nduct themselves. Whenever our
punishments are not made intelligible, they are cruel; they give pain,
without producing any future advantage. To make punishment
intelligible to children, it must be not only _immediately_, but
_repeatedly_ and _uniformly_, associated with the actions which we
wish them to avoid.

When children begin to reason, punishment affects them in a different
manner from what it did whilst they were governed, like irrational
animals, merely by the direct associations of pleasure and pain. They
distinguish, in many instances, between coincidence and causation;
they discover, that the will of others is the immediate cause,
frequently, of the pain they suffer; they learn by experience, that
the _will_ is not an unchangeable cause, that it is influenced by
circumstances, by passions, by persuasion, by caprice. It must be,
however, by slow degrees, that they acquire any ideas of justice. They
cannot know our views relative to their future happiness; their first
ideas of the justice of the punishments we inflict, cannot, therefore,
be accurate. They regulate these first judgments by the simple idea,
that our punishments ought to be exactly the same always in the same
circumstances; when they understand words, they learn to expect that
our words and actions should precisely agree, that we should keep our
promises, and _fulfil_ our threats. They next learn, that as they are
punished for voluntary faults, they cannot justly be punished until it
has been distinctly explained to them what is _wrong_ or _forbidden_,
and what is _right_ or _permitted_. The words _right_ or _wrong_,
and _permitted_ or _forbidden_, are synonymous at first in the
apprehensions of children; and obedience and disobedience are their
only ideas of virtue and vice. Whatever we command to be done, or
rather whatever we associate with pleasure, they imagine to be right;
whatever we prohibit, provided we have uniformly associated it with
pain, they believe to be wrong. This implicit submission to our
authority, and these confined ideas of right and wrong, are
convenient, or apparently convenient, to indolent or tyrannical
governours; and they sometimes endeavour to prolong the reign of
ignorance, with the hope of establishing in the mind an opinion of
their own infallibility. But this is a dangerous, as well as an
unjust, system. By comparison with the conduct and opinions of others,
children learn to judge of their parents and preceptor