from personal feeling. No poisoned arrow of injustice
remains rankling in the child's breast; no rebellious feeling that the
parent has taken advantage of his superior strength to inflict the
punishment: it is perceived to be absolutely _fair_, and, being fair,
it must be, although painful, yet satisfactory to that sense of
justice which is a passion of childhood.

Our American children are as precocious in will-power as they are
keen-witted, and they need a special discipline. The courage,
activity, and pioneer spirit of the fathers, exercised in hewing their
way through virgin forests, hunting wild beasts in mountain solitudes,
opening up undeveloped lands, prospecting for metals through trackless
plains, choosing their own vocations, helping to govern their
country,--all these things have reacted upon the children, and they
are thoroughly independent, feeling the need of caring for themselves
when hardly able to toddle.

Entrust this precocious bundle of nerves and individuality to a person
of weak will or feeble intelligence, and the child promptly becomes
his ruler. The power of strong volition becomes caprice, he does not
learn the habit of obedience, and thus valuable directive power is
lost to the world.

"The lowest classes of society," says Dr. Harris, "are the lowest,
not because there is any organized conspiracy to keep them down, but
because they are lacking in directive power." The jails, the prisons,
the reformatories, are filled with men who are there because they were
weak, more than because they were evil. If the right discipline in
home and school had been given them, they would never have become the
charge of the nation. Thus we waste force constantly, force of mind
and of spirit sufficient to move mountains, because we do not insist
that every child shall exercise his "inherited right," which is, "that
he be taught to obey."

It is a grave subject, this of will-training, the gravest perhaps that
we can consider, and its deepest waters lie far below the sounding of
my plummet. Some of the principles, however, on which it rests are as
firmly fixed as the bed of the ocean, which remains changeless though
the waves continually shift above:--

1. If we can but cultivate the _habit_ of doing right, we enlist in
our service one of the strongest of human agencies. Its momentum is so
great that it may propel the child into the course of duty before he
has time to discuss the question, or to parley with