url you down a mountain-side with terrific
rapidity; others stop half-way, bringing you face to face with a blank
wall; and others again will lose you entirely on a bleak and trackless
plain. But no matter which route you select, you will have the wise
company of a great many teachers, parents, and guardians, and an
innumerable throng of fair and lovely children will journey by your
side.

The road of threat and fear, of arbitrary and over-severe punishment,
has been much traveled in all times, though perhaps it is a little
grass-grown now.

The child who obeys you merely because he fears punishment is a slave
who cowers under the lash of the despot. Undue severity makes him a
liar and a coward. He hates his master, he hates the thing he is made
to do; there is a bitter sense of injustice, a seething passion of
revenge, forever within him; and were he strong enough he would rise
and destroy the power that has crushed him. He has done right because
he was forced to do so, not because he desired it; and since the
right-doing, the obedience, was neither the fruit of his reason nor
his love, it cannot be permanent.

The feeling of justice is strong in the child's mind, and you have
constantly wounded that feeling. You have destroyed the sense of cause
and effect by your arbitrary punishments. You have corrected him for
disobedience, for carelessness, for unkindness, for untruthfulness,
for noisiness, and for slowness in learning his lessons.

How is he to know which of these offenses is the greatest, if all have
received the same punishment? Why should giving him a good thrashing
teach him to be kind to his little sister? Why should he learn the
multiplication table with greater rapidity because you ferule him
soundly? Have you ever found pain an assistance to the memory?

If he has little intellectual perception of the difference between
truth and falsehood, why should you suppose that smart strokes on any
portion of the body would quicken that perception?

Is it not clear as the sun at noonday that, since he observes the
punishment to have no necessary relation to the offense, and since he
observes it to be light or severe according to your pleasure,--is it
not clear that he will suppose you to be using your superior strength
in order to treat him unfairly, and will not the supposition sow seeds
of hatred and rebellion in his heart?

Another road to discipline is that of bribery.

To endeavor to secure goodness