with a child that he is to receive a certain sum
every Saturday, and then after two or three weeks to forget it, and when
the boy comes to call for it, to say, petulantly, "Oh, don't come to bother
me about that now--I am busy; and besides, I have not got the money now;"
or, when a boy has spent all his allowance on the first two or three days
of the week, and comes to beg importunately for more, to say, "It was very
wrong in you to spend all your money at once, and I have a great mind not
to give you any more. I will, however, do it just this time, but I shall
not again, you may depend;" or, to borrow money in some sudden emergency
out of the fund which a child has accumulated for a special purpose, and
then to forget or neglect to repay it--to manage loosely and capriciously
in any such ways as these will be sure to make the attempt a total failure;
that is to say, such management will be sure to be a failure in respect to
teaching the boy to act on right principles in the management of money, and
training him to habits of exactness and faithfulness in the fulfillment of
his obligations. But in making him a thoughtless, wasteful, teasing, and
selfish boy while he remains a boy, and fixing him, when he comes to
manhood, in the class of those who are utterly untrustworthy, faithless in
the performance of their promises, and wholly unscrupulous in respect to
the means by which they obtain money, it may very probably turn out to be a
splendid success.

CHAPTER XXI.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.

It might, perhaps, be thought that, in a book which professes to show
how an efficient government can be established and maintained by _gentle
measures_, the subject of corporal punishment could have no place. It seems
important, however, that there should be here introduced a brief though
distinct presentation of the light in which, in a philosophical point of
view, this instrumentality is to be regarded.

_The Teachings of Scripture_.

The resort to corporal punishment in the training of children seems to be
spoken of in many passages contained in the Scriptures as of fundamental
necessity. But there can be no doubt that the word _rod_, as used in those
passages, is used simply as the emblem of parental authority. This is in
accordance with the ordinary custom of Hebrew writers in those days, and
with the idiom of their language, by which a single visible or tangible
object was employed as the representative or expression of