chide him for taking so short-sighted a
view of the subject, or to tell him it is very foolish for him to talk as
he does, or silence him by a dogmatic decision, delivered in a dictatorial
and overbearing manner, all of which is too often found to characterize the
discussions between parents and children, but calmly and quietly to present
to him the considerations bearing upon the question which he has not yet
seen. To this end, and to bring the mind of the child into that listening
and willing state without which all arguments and even all attempts at
instruction are wasted, we must listen candidly to what he says himself,
put the best construction upon it, give it its full force; see it, in a
word, as nearly as possible as _he_ sees it, and let him know that we
do so. Then he will be much more ready to receive any additional
considerations which we may present to his mind, as things that must also
be taken into account in forming a final judgment on the question.

A boy, for example, who is full of health and increasing vigor, and in
whom, of course, those organs on which the consciousness of strength and
the impulses of courage depend are in the course of rapid and healthy
development, in reading to his mother a story in which a thief that came
into a back store-room of a house in the evening, with a bag, to steal
meal, was detected by the owner and frightened away, looks up from his book
and says, in a very valiant manner,

"If I had been there, and had a gun, I would have shot him on the spot."

_The Rough Mode of Treatment_.

Now, if the mother wishes to confuse and bewilder, and to crush down, so to
speak, the reasoning faculties of her child, she may say,

"Nonsense, George! It is of no use for you to talk big in that way. You
would not dare to fire a gun in such a case, still less, to shoot a man.
The first thing you would do would be to run away and hide. And then,
besides, it would be very wicked for you to kill a man in that way. You
would be very likely to get yourself hung for murder. Besides, the Bible
says that we must not resist evil; so you should not talk so coolly about
shooting a man."

The poor boy would be overpowered by such a rebuke as this, and perhaps
silenced. The incipient and half-formed ideas in his mind in respect to the
right of self-defense, the virtue of courage, the sanctity of life, the
nature and the limits of the doctrine of non-resistance, would be all
thrown together into