vered himself, or to mend
the tear as well as he can. Will he not feel that the evil is one of his
own producing? Will he not while paying this penalty be continuously
conscious of the connection between it and its cause? And will he not,
spite his irritation, recognise more or less clearly the justice of the
arrangement? If several lessons of this kind fail to produce
amendment--if suits of clothes are prematurely spoiled--if the father,
pursuing this same system of discipline, declines to spend money for new
ones until the ordinary time has elapsed--and if meanwhile, there occur
occasions on which, having no decent clothes to go in, the boy is
debarred from joining the rest of the family on holiday excursions and
_fete_ days, it is manifest that while he will keenly feel the
punishment, he can scarcely fail to trace the chain of causation, and to
perceive that his own carelessness is the origin of it. And seeing this,
he will not have any such sense of injustice as if there were no obvious
connection between the transgression and its penalty.

Again, the tempers both of parents and children are much less liable to
be ruffled under this system than under the ordinary system. When
instead of letting children experience the painful results which
naturally follow from wrong conduct, parents themselves inflict certain
other painful results, they produce double mischief. Making, as they do,
multiplied family laws; and identifying their own supremacy and dignity
with the maintenance of these laws; every transgression is regarded as
an offence against themselves, and a cause of anger on their part. And
then come the further vexations which result from taking upon
themselves, in the shape of extra labour or cost, those evil
consequences which should have been allowed to fall on the wrong-doers.
Similarly with the children. Penalties which the necessary reaction of
things brings round upon them--penalties which are inflicted by
impersonal agency, produce an irritation that is comparatively slight
and transient; whereas, penalties voluntarily inflicted by a parent, and
afterwards thought of as caused by him or her, produce an irritation
both greater and more continued. Just consider how disastrous would be
the result if this empirical method were pursued from the beginning.
Suppose it were possible for parents to take upon themselves the
physical sufferings entailed on their children by ignorance and
awkwardness; and that while