t of adventure, play of fancy, and
stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. Even
where blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute
straightforwardness and the down-right personal courage to show oneself
as one is. As long as the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no
perfect honour will be found in children. So long as the home and the
school use this method of education, brutality will be developed in the
child himself at the cost of humanity. The child uses on animals, on
his young brothers and sisters, on his comrades, the methods applied to
himself. He puts in practice the same argument, that "badness" must be
cured with blows. Only children accustomed to be treated mildly, learn
to see that influence can be gained without using force. To see this
is one of man's privileges, sacrificed by man through descending to the
methods of the brute. Only by the child seeing his teacher always and
everywhere abstaining from the use of actual force, will he come himself
to despise force on all those occasions which do not involve the defence
of a weaker person against physical superiority. The foundation of the
desire for war is to be sought for less in the war games than in the
teachers' rod.

To defend corporal discipline, children's own statements are brought
in evidence, they are reported as saying they knew they deserved such
discipline in order to be made good. There is no lower example of
hypocrisy in human nature than this. It is true the child may be sincere
in other cases in saying that he feels that through punishment he has
atoned for a fault which was weighing upon his conscience. But this is
really the foundation of a false system of ethics, the kind which still
continues to be preached as Christian, namely; that a fault may be
atoned for by sufferings which are not directly connected with the
fault. The basis of the new morality is just the opposite as I have
already shown. It teaches that no fault can be atoned for, that no one
can escape the results of his actions in any way.

Untruthfulness belongs to the faults which the teacher thinks he must
most frequently punish with blows. But there is no case in which this
method is more dangerous.

When the much-needed guide-book for parents is published, the
well-known story of George Washington and the hatchet must appear in it,
accompanied by the remark which a clever ten-year-old child added to the
anecdote: "It is no trouble telli