and infringe
the rights of others. Moreover, our own egotism is concealed beneath
our errors of treatment; what we really resent in the child is that he
gives us trouble; we struggle against him in order to protect our own
comfort, our own liberty. How often at the bottom of our hearts we
have felt that we have been unjust, but have stifled this impression.
The little rebel does not accuse us or bear us malice. On the
contrary; just as he persists in his "naughtinesses" which are forms
of life, so does he persist in loving us, in forgiving us everything,
in forgetting our offenses, in longing to be with us, to embrace us,
to sit upon our knees, to fall asleep on our bosom. This, too, is a
form of life. And we, if we are tired or satiated, repulse him,
masking this excess of selfishness under a hypocritical pretense of
concern for the child himself: "Don't be so silly!" Insult and
calumny are always on our lips in the eternal refrain: "Naughty,
naughty." And yet the figure of the child might stand for that of
perfect goodness, which "thinketh no evil, delighteth not in iniquity,
beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things." As to
us--no, we cannot always say as much of ourselves.

If the struggle between the adult and the child could be brought to an
end in "peace," and the adult, accepting the conditions of infant
life, would seek to help the child, the former would be able to
advance towards one of the most sublime enjoyments which Nature can
bestow: that of following the natural development of the child, and
seeing the man evolved. If the opening rosebud has become a
commonplace of poetry, how much greater is the poetry of the infant
soul in its manifestations? Now this ineffable gift which was placed
beside us, in order that the miracle might accompany us and comfort
us, we trample under foot in our wrath, blaspheming as if demented.

* * * * *

When the child desires to touch and to act, in spite of "punishments
of every kind," he persists in exercises necessary "to his
development," and displays a strength of will in the matter against
which we are often powerless; he shows the same persistence as in
breathing, in crying when he is hungry, and in raising himself when he
wants to walk. Thus the child turns to external objects which respond
to his needs: if he finds them, he displays his powers in muscular or
sensory exercises, and then he is joyous; and if he does not find
them, h