be borne in mind in our management of them. The
child loves intensely, or dislikes strongly; craves most earnestly for
sympathy, clings most tenaciously to the stronger, better, higher around
it, or to what it fancies so; or shrinks, in often causeless but
unconquerable dread, from things or persons that have made on it an
unpleasant impression. Reason as yet does not govern its caprices, nor
the more intelligent selfishness of later years hinder their
manifestation. The waywardness of the most wilful child is determined by
some cause near at hand; and those who love children, and can read their
thoughts, will not in general be long in discovering their motives and
seeing through their conduct.

One word more must be said with reference to that intense craving for
sympathy so characteristic of the child. It is this which often
underlies the disposition to exaggerate its ailments, or even to feign
such as do not exist, and in such attempts at deception it often
perseveres with almost incredible resolution. Over and over again I have
met with instances where the motives to such deception were neither the
increase of comfort nor the gratification of mere indolence; but the
monopolising the love and sympathy which during some bygone illness had
been extended to it, and which it could not bear to share again with its
brothers and sisters. This feeling, too, sometimes becomes quite
uncontrollable, and the child then needs as much care and as judicious
management, both bodily and mental, to bring it back to health, as
would be called for in the case of some adult hypochondriac or
monomaniac.

A caution may not be out of place as to the importance of not
ministering to this tendency to exaggerated self-consciousness by
talking of children's ailments in their hearing, or by seeming to notice
the complaints they make as though they were something out of the common
way.

It will be observed that throughout I have dwelt more on disorders of
the moral faculties than of the intellectual powers in childhood, and I
have done so because I believe them to be the more common and the more
important. In the feeble-minded the moral sense almost invariably
participates in the weakness of the intellect; but it is by no means
unusual for the former to be grievously perverted, while the
intelligence is in no respect deficient. The moral element in the child
seems to me to assert its superiority in this, that it is the most
keenly sensitive,