her came into the room one day and found Johnny disputing earnestly
with his Cousin Jane on the question which was the tallest--Johnny very
strenuously maintaining that he was the tallest, _because he was a boy_.
His older brother, James, who was present at the time, measured them, and
found that Johnny in reality was the tallest.

Now there was nothing wrong in his feeling a pride and pleasure in the
thought that he was physically superior to his cousin, and though it was
foolish for him to insist himself on this superiority in a boasting way,
it was the foolishness of ignorance only. He had not learned the
principle--which half mankind do not seem ever to learn during the whole
course of their lives--that it is far wiser and better to let our good
qualities appear naturally of themselves, than to claim credit for them
beforehand by boasting. It would have been much wiser for Johnny to have
admitted at the outset that Jane might possibly be taller than he, and then
to have awaited quietly the result of the measuring.

But we can not blame him much for not having learned this particular wisdom
at five years of age, when so many full-grown men and women never learn it
at all.

Nor was there any thing blameworthy in him in respect to the false logic
involved in his argument, that his being a boy made him necessarily taller
than his cousin, a girl of the same age. There was a _semblance_ of proof
in that fact--what the logicians term a presumption. But the reasoning
powers are very slowly developed in childhood. They are very seldom aided
by any instruction really adapted to the improvement of them; and we ought
not to expect that such children can at all clearly distinguish a semblance
from a reality in ideas so extremely abstruse as those relating to the
logical connection between the premises and the conclusion in a process of
ratiocination.

In this case as in the other we expect them to understand at once, without
instruction, what we find it extremely difficult to learn ourselves; for
a large portion of mankind prove themselves utterly unable ever to
discriminate between sound arguments and those which are utterly
inconsequent and absurd.

In a word, what Johnny requires in such a case as this is, not ridicule to
shame him out of his false reasoning, nor censure or punishment to cure him
of his boasting, but simply instruction.

And this instruction it is much better to give _not_ in direct connection
with the