cation of Man by the God of Israel the balance
between rewards and punishments has been kept fairly even. Hell has
been balanced by Heaven, calamity by prosperity, death by life. It
has been far otherwise with the child. His punishments have been
many, and his rewards few. At the present day men are more humane
than they used to be; and corporal punishment, though still resorted
to, counts for less than it used to do in the training of the child.
But punishments of various kinds are still regarded as indispensable
adjuncts to school discipline; and it is still taken for granted in
far too many schools that the fear of punishment and the hope of
reward are the only effective motives to educational effort.

It is difficult to say which of the two motives is the more likely to
demoralise the child. A _regime_ of punishment is not necessarily a
_regime_ of cruelty; but punishment can scarcely fail to savour of
severity, and when the doctrine of original sin is in the ascendant,
and the inborn wilfulness and stubbornness of the child are
postulated by his teachers, the indefinable boundary line between
severity and cruelty is easily crossed. Of the tendency of cruelty
to demoralise its victims I have already spoken. But the effect of
punishment on the child must be considered in its relation to his
mental, as well as to his moral, development. Scholarships, prizes,
high places in class, and other such rewards are for the few, not for
the many. If the many are to be roused to exertion, the fear of
punishment (in the hypothetical absence of any other motive) must
be ever before them. What will happen to them when that motive is
withdrawn, as it will be when the child becomes the adolescent? His
education has been distasteful to the child, partly because his
teachers have assumed from the outset that it would be and must be
so, but chiefly because in their ignorance they have taken pains to
make it so, his school life having been so ordered as to combine the
maximum of strain with the maximum of _ennui_. His teachers have done
everything for him, except those mechanical and monotonous exercises
which they felt they might trust him to do by himself. Some of
his mental faculties have become stunted and atrophied through lack
of exercise. Others have been allowed to wither in the bud. If he
happens to belong to the "masses," he will have completed his school
education at the age of thirteen or fourteen. What will he do with
himse