Children have had passed on their moral characteristics the extremes of human judgment. By some, including a number of theologians, they have been viewed as steeped in depravity; by others, e.g., Rousseau, they have been regarded as the perfection of the Creator's workmanship.

If we are to throw any light on the point in dispute we must avoid the unfairness of applying grown-up standards to childish actions, and must expect neither the vices nor the virtues of manhood. We must further take some pains to get, so far as this is possible, at children's natural inclinations so as to see whether, and if so how far, they set in the direction of good or of bad.

Traces of the Brute.

Even a distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. The characteristic feelings and impulses are centred in self and the satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents itself, and to resent others' participation in such enjoyment?

We note, further, that when later on he makes fuller acquaintance with his social surroundings, his first attitude has in it much of the hostility of the Ishmaelite. The removal of the feeding bottle before full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of the baby's "will to live," and of its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. Here we have the first rude germ of that opposition of will which makes the Ishmaelite look on others as his foes.

The same attitude of isolating hostility is apt to show itself towards other children. In the matter of toys, for example, the natural way of a child is very frequently not only to make free with other children's property when he has the chance, but to show the strongest objection to any imitation of this freedom by others, sometimes indeed to display a dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he himself does not want.

The same vigorous egoism inspires the whole scale of childish envies and jealousies, from those having to do with things of the appetite to those which trouble themselves about the marks of others' good-will, such as caresses and praises.

In this wide category of childish egoisms we seem to be near the level of animal ways. Out of all this fierce pushing of desire whereby the child comes into rude collision with others' wishes, there issue the storms of young passion. The energy of these displays of wrath as the imperious little will feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of its comicality something impressive. We all know the shocking scene as the boy Ishmaelite gives clearest and most emphatic utterance to his will by hitting out with his arms, stamping and kicking, throwing things down on the floor and breaking them, and accompanying this war-dance with savage howlings and yellings. The outburst tends to concentrate itself in a real attack on somebody. Sometimes this is the offender, as when Darwin's boy at the age of two years and three months would throw books, sticks, etc., at any one who offended him. But almost anybody or anything will do as an object of attack. A child of four on having his lordly purpose crossed would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him, jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in many cases improved upon by biting.

Such fits of temper, as we call them, vary in their manner from child to child. Thus, whereas one little boy would savagely bite or roll on the floor, his sister was accustomed to dance about and stamp. They vary greatly too in their frequency and their force. Some children show in their anger little if anything of savage furiousness. It is to be added, that with those who do show it, it is wont in most cases to appear only for a limited period.

The resemblance of this fierce anger to the fury of the savage and of the brute can hardly fail to be noticed. Here indeed, as is illustrated in the good hymn of our nursery days, which bids us leave biting to the dogs, we see most plainly how firmly planted an animal root lies at the bottom of our proud humanity. Ages of civilisation have not succeeded in eradicating some of the most characteristic and unpleasant impulses of the brute.

At the same time a child's passionateness is more than a brute instinct. He suffers consciously; he realises himself in lonely antagonism to a world. This is seen in the bodily attitude of dejection which often follows the more vigorous stage of the fit, when the little Ishmaelite, growing aware of the impotence of his anger, is wont to throw himself on the floor and to hide his head in solitary wretchedness. This consciousness of absolute isolation and hostility reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as human will. A dim recognition of the stronger will facing him brings the sense of injury, of tyrannous power.

Now this feeling of being injured and oppressed is human, and is fraught with moral possibilities. It is not as yet morally good; for the sense of injury is capable of developing, and may actually turn by-and-by into, hatred. Yet, as we shall see, it holds within itself a promise of something higher.

This predominance of self, this kinship with the unsocial brute, which shows itself in these germinal animosities, seems to be discoverable also in the unfeelingness of children. A common charge against them from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.

That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother may leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some trivial circumstance of her affliction which is worse than the absorption in play through its tantalising want of any genuine feeling. If, for example, she is ill, the event is interesting to him merely as supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half an hour in his mother's sick-room, coolly informed his nurse: "I have had a very nice time, mamma's ill!" The order of the two statements is significant of the common attitude of mind of children towards others' sufferings.

When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling is still more noticeable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death. While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being often taken with a shocking curiosity to peep into the dead room, and to get perhaps the gruesome pleasure of touching the dead body so as to know what "as cold as death" means, and at best showing only a feeling of awe before a great mystery.

No one, I think, will doubt that judged by our standards children are often profoundly and shockingly callous. But the question arises here, too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. It is one thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We are apt to forget that a large part of the manifestation of human suffering is quite unintelligible to a little child.

Again, when an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to spy something besides the sadness. The little girl who wanted to touch, and to know the meaning of "cold as death," on going to see a dead schoolmate was not unnaturally taken up with the beauty of the scene, with the white hangings and the white flowers.

I am far from saying that the first acquaintance with death commonly leaves a child indifferent to the signs of woe. I believe, on the contrary, that children are frequently affected in a vague way by the surrounding gloom. In some cases, too, as published reminiscences of childhood show, the first acquaintance with the cruel monarch has sometimes shaken a child's whole being with an infinite, nameless sense of woe.

With this unfeelingness children are frequently charged with active unkindness, amounting to cruelty. La Fontaine spoke of the age of childhood as pitiless (sans pitiÉ).

This appearance of cruelty will now and again show itself in dealings with other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. One little girl was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make a beginning, fortunately only a feeble beginning, at smashing its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy an ugly-looking doll.

Such malicious treatment of smaller infants is, I think, rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child's dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of his cruelty.

At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malevolent intention in a child's treatment of animals. A little girl when only a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. Older children often have a way of treating even their pets with a similar roughness.

Yet I think we cannot safely say that such rough usage is intended to be painful. It seems rather to be the outcome of the mere energy of the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate his pet.

The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an explanation, then gave it himself: 'Mr. Fly dom (gone) to by-by'. But he would not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently remained, and he continued uneasy about it." Here the arrest of life clearly brought a kind of shock, and we may safely say was not thought out beforehand. Children may pounce upon and maul small moving things for a number of reasons. The wish to gratify their sense of power—which is probably keener in children who so rarely gratify it than in grown-ups—will often explain these actions. To stop all that commotion, all that buzzing on the window-pane, by a single tap of the finger, that may bring a delicious thrill of power to a child. Curiosity, too, is a powerful incentive to this kind of maltreatment of animals. Children have something of the anatomist's impulse to take living things apart, to see where the blood is, as one child put it, and so forth.

I think, then, that we may give the small offenders the benefit of the doubt, and not attribute their rough handling of animals to a wish to inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which they are clearly aware. Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and delight in showing one's power and producing an effect, seem sufficient to explain a large part of the unlearned brutality of the first years.

We have now looked at one of the darkest sides of the child and have found that though it is decidedly unpleasant it is not quite so ugly as it has been painted. Children are no doubt apt to be greedy, and otherwise unsociable, to be ferocious in their anger, and to be sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is some consolation to reflect that their savageness is not quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate and calculating egoism.

Pure Ishmaelite as he seems, however, a child has what we call the social instincts, and inconsistently enough no doubt he shows at times that after all he wants to join himself to those whom at other times he treats as foes. If he has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits of tenderness. If he is now dead to others' sufferings he is at another time taken with a most amiable childish concern for their happiness.

The germ of this instinct of attachment to society may be said to disclose itself in a rude form in the first weeks of life, when he begins to get used to and to depend on the human presence, and is miserable when this is taken from him.

In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate kind of sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser realisation of this oneness comes after separation. A girl of thirteen months was separated from her mother during six weeks. On the return of the latter she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave her restored companion for a minute. A like outbreak of tender sympathy is apt to follow a fit of naughtiness when a child feels itself taken back to the mother's heart.

Sympathy, it is commonly said, is a kind of imitation, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A child has been observed under the age of seven months to look unhappy, drawing down well the corners of the mouth in the characteristic baby-fashion when his nurse pretended to cry.

This imitative sympathy deepens with attachment. We see something of it in the child's make-believe. When, for example, a little girl on finding that her mother's head ached pretended to have a bad head, we appear to see the working of an impulse to get near and share in others' experiences. The same feeling shows itself in play, especially in the treatment of the doll, which has to go through all that the child goes through, to be bathed, scolded, nursed when poorly, and so forth.

From this imitative acting of another's trouble, so as to share in it, there is but a step to that more direct apprehension of it which we call sympathy. Children sometimes begin to display such understanding of others' trouble early in the second year. One mite of fourteen months was quite concerned at the misery of an elder sister, crawling towards her and making comical endeavours by grunts and imitative movements of the fingers to allay her crying. I have a number of stories showing that for a period beginning early in the second year it is not uncommon for children to betray an exuberance of pity, being moved almost to tears, for example, when the mother says, "Poor uncle!" or when contemplating in a picture the tragic fate of Humpty Dumpty.

Very sweet and sacred to a mother are the first manifestations of tenderness towards herself. A child about the age of two has a way of looking at and touching its mother's face with something of the rapturous expression of a lover. Still sweeter, perhaps, are the first clear indications of loving concern. The temporary loss of her presence, due to illness or other cause, is often the occasion for the appearance of a deeper tenderness. A little boy of three spontaneously brought his story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the same child used to follow her about after her recovery with all the devotion of a little knight. At other times it is the suspicion of an injury to his beloved one, as when one little fellow seeing the strange doctor lay hold of his mother's wrist stood up like an outraged turkey-cock, backing into his mother's skirts, ready to charge the assaulter.

A deeper and thoughtful kind of sympathy often comes with the advent of the more reflective years. Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes its awakener. "Are you old, mother?" asked a boy of five. "Why?" she answered. "Because," he continued, "the older you are the nearer you are to dying." There was no doubt thought of his own loss in this question: yet there was, one may hope, a germ of solicitude for the mother too.

This first thought for others frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist in little household occupations. A boy of two years and one month happened to overhear his nurse say to herself: "I wish that Anne would remember to fill the nursery boiler". "He listened, and presently trotted off; found the said Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: 'Nanna, Nanna!' (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed to the boiler, and added: 'Go dare, go dare,' so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade her."

With this practical form of sympathy there goes a quite charming disposition to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. Early in the second year, too, children are wont to show themselves kindly by giving kisses and other pretty courtesies. In truth from about this date they are often quite charming in their expressions of good will, so that the good Bishop Earle hardly exaggerates when he writes of the child: "He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater". Later on a like amiable disposition will show itself in graceful turns of speech, as when a little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: "Please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?"

Just as there are these beginnings of affectionate concern for the mother and other people, so there is ample evidence of kindness to animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world.

When once the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will generally take kindly to an animal. A little boy of fifteen months quickly overcame his fright at the barking of his grandfather's dog, and began to share his biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for his amusement.

At a quite early age, too, children will show the germ of a truly humane feeling towards animals. The same little boy that bravely got over his fear of the dog's barking would, when nineteen months old, begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street. Stronger manifestations of pity are seen at a later age. A little boy of four was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.

The indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their hearts. This is one of the most striking manifestations of the better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself.

The close absorbing sympathy which we often observe between a child and animals seems to come from a sense of common weaknesses and needs. Perhaps there is in it something of that instinctive impulse of helpless things to band together which we see in sheep and other gregarious animals. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years old: "Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the animals than to me". "Perhaps I am," he replied, "you see they are not so well off as you are."

The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, a child's intercourse with his doll or his toy "gee gee" is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude which has something of the endurance of a maternal instinct.

Here, too, as we know, children vary greatly; there are the loving and the unloving moods, and there are the loving and the unloving children. Yet allowing for these facts, I think it may be said that in these first fresh outgoings of human tenderness we have a comforting set off to the unamiable manifestations described above.

The Lapse into Lying.

The other main charge against children is that they tell lies. According to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the manner born, and equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even writers on childhood who are by no means prejudiced against it lean to the view that lying is instinctive and universal among children.

Now it is surely permissible to doubt whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious.

To begin with those little ruses and dissimulations which are said to appear almost from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is plainly difficult to bring them into the category of full-fledged lies. When, for example, a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your asking for it holds out empty hands, it would be hard to name this action a lie, even though there may be in it a germ of deception. These little ruses or "acted lies" seem at the worst to be attempts to put you off the scent in what is regarded as a private matter, and to have the minimum of intentional deception. This childish passion for guarding secrets may account for later and more serious-looking falsehoods.

There is a more alarming appearance of mendacity when the child comes to the use of language and proffers statements which, if he reflected, he might know to be false. Even here, however, we may easily apply grown-up standards unfairly. Anybody who has observed children's play and knows how real to them their fancies become for the moment will be chary of applying to their sayings the word "lie". There may be solemn sticklers for truth who would be shocked to hear the child when at play saying, "I am a coachman," "Dolly is crying," and so forth. But the discerning see nothing to be alarmed at here.

On the same level of moral obliquity I should be disposed to place those cases where a child will contradictingly say the opposite of what he is told. A little French boy was overheard saying to himself: "Papa parle mal, il a dit sevette, bÉbÉ parle bien, il dit serviette". Such reversals may be a kind of play too: the child not unnaturally gets tired now and then of being told that he is wrong, and for the moment imagines himself right and his elders wrong, immensely enjoying the idea.

The case looks graver when an "untruth" is uttered in answer to a question. A little boy on being asked by his mother who told him something, answered, "Dolly". "False, and knowingly false," somebody will say, especially when he learns that the depraved youngster instantly proceeded to laugh. But is not this laugh just the saving clause of the story, suggesting that it was play and the spirit of mischief at bottom?

In this case, I suspect, there was co-operant a strongly marked childish characteristic, the love of producing an effect. A child has a large measure of that feeling which R. L. Stevenson attributes to the light-hearted Innes in Weir of Hermiston, "the mere pleasure of beholding interested faces". The well-known "cock and bull" stories of small children are inspired by this love of strong effect. It is the dramatic impulse of childhood endeavouring to bring life into the dulness of the serious hours. Childish vanity often assists, as where a little girl of five would go about scattering the most alarming kind of false news, as, for example, that baby was dead, simply to court attention and make herself of some importance.

A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these, backed by a strong impulse to astonish, and a playful turn for contradiction and paradox, seem to me to account for most of this early fibbing and other similar varieties of early misstatement. Naughty it is, no doubt, in a measure; but is it quite fairly branded as lying, that is, as a serious attempt to deceive?

In some cases, I think, the vivid play of imagination which prompts the untrue assertion may lead to a measure of self-deception. When, for example, an Italian child, of whom Signorina Lombroso tells us, who is out for a walk, and wanting to be carried says, "My leg hurts me and my foot too just here, I can't walk, I can't, I can't," it is possible at least that the vivid imagination of the South produces at the moment an illusory sense of fatigue. And if so we must hesitate to call the statement wholly a falsehood.

A fertile source of childish "untruth," which may be more true than untrue in the sense of expressing the conviction of the moment, is the wish to please. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for his mother gushes out, "You're the best mother in the whole world!" may be hardly conscious of any exaggeration. There is more of artfulness in the flatteries which appear to involve a calculating intention to say the nice agreeable thing. Some children, especially little girls, are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are perhaps those who in later years make the good society actors. Yet if there is a measure of untruth in such pretty flatteries, one needs to be superhuman in order to condemn them harshly.

The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and this, I suspect, may point to a more intentional and conscious kind of untruth. If, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say "Yes" makes it very hard to say "No". Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early experience. When she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the family was called Edith, remarked to her: "That's a pretty name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn't that a pretty name?" On being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of "Eleanor," and yet feared to be rude and say so. She got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as "Edith".

In such cases as this the fear to give offence may be reinforced by the mastering force of "suggestion". Just as the hypnotiser "suggests" to his subject the idea that he is ill, that the dirty water in this glass is wine, and so forth, compelling him to accept and act out the idea, so we all exercise a kind of suggestive sway over children's minds. Our leading questions, as when we say, "Isn't this pretty?" may for a moment set up a half belief that the thing must be so. Thus in a double fashion do our words control children's thoughts, driving them now into contradiction, drawing them at other times and in other moods into submissive assent. Wordsworth has illustrated how an unwise and importunate demand for a reason from a child may drive him into invention.[9]

I do not say that these are the only impulses which prompt to this early fibbing. From some records of the first years I learn that a child may drift into something like a lie under the pressure of fear, more especially fear of being scolded. One little fellow, more than once instanced in this work, a single child brought up wholly by his mother, perpetrated his first fib when he was about twenty-two months old. He went, it seems, and threw his doll down stairs in one of those capricious outbursts towards favourites which children share with certain sovereigns, then went to his mother and making great pretence of grief said, "Poor dolly tumbled". If this had stood alone I should have been ready to look on it as a little childish comedy; but the same child a month or two afterwards would invent a fib when he wanted his mother to do something. For example, he was one morning lying in bed with his mother and wanted much to get up. His mother told him to look for the watch and see what time it was. He felt under the pillow pretending to find and consult the time-teller, saying: "Time to get up". Here it was clearly the force of the young will resisting an unpleasant check which excited the sober faculties to something like deception.

To say that our moral discipline with its injunctions, its corrections, is a great promoter of childish untruth may sound shocking, but it is I think an indisputable truth. We can see how this begins to work in the first years. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother "monkey," and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: "I said I was a monkey". A child is often driven into such ruses by the instinct of self-protection.

Our system of discipline may develop untruth in other ways too. When, for example, punishment has been inflicted and its inflicter, relenting, asks: "Are you sorry?" or "Aren't you sorry?" the answer is exceedingly likely to be "No," even though this may at the moment be half felt to be untrue. From such partial untruths the way is easy to complete ones, as when a naughty little boy who is shut up in his room and kept without food, is asked: "Are you hungry?" and with the hardihood of a confirmed sinner answers "No," even though the low and dismal tone of the word shows how much the untruth goes against the grain.

I think there is no doubt, then, that at a certain age children may, more especially under a severe home authority, develop, apart from contagion, a tendency to falsehood. Some may see in this, as in childish fears and cruelties, rudiments of characteristics which belonged to remote uncivilised ancestors. However this be, it is hard to say that these fibs have that clear intention to deceive which constitutes a complete lie.

There are curious points in the manner of childish fibbing. A good many children seem to be like savages in distinguishing those to whom one is bound to speak the truth. The "bad form" of telling a lie to the head-master is a later illustration of the same thing. On the other hand it seems to be thought that there are people who are specially fitted to be the victims of untruth. Even young children soon find out who it is among the servants that being credulous supplies the best listener to their amazing inventions.

Another interesting point is the way in which the perfectly baseless fictions of children are apt to grow into permanent "stories". In the nursery and in the playground there are wont to be developed myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded, and may be handed down to successors. In all such cases of propagated untruths the impulse of imitation and the tendency of the child's mind to accept statements uncritically are of course at work. The "lie" propagated by this influence of contagion very soon ceases to be a lie.

Fealty to Truth.

In order to understand what childish untruth really amounts to we must carefully note its after-effects on the perpetrator. It seems certain that many children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering that, of the falsity of which they are more or less aware. This is evidenced in the well-known devices by which the young casuist thinks to mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally, "I do not mean it," "in my mind," or some similar palliative. Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.

The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie, which catches the conscience at its tenderest, is much more than this passing qualm, and has been remembered by many in later life. Here is a case. A young lady whom I know remembers that when a child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but presently remembering the eyes, said: "Poor child, you could not see well". She knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie.

Such remorse, in certain cases prolonged beyond the first lie, comes to the little offender as he or she lies in bed and recalls the untruths of the day. Some children suffer greatly from this periodic reflection on their lies.

Some of the more poignant of the sufferings which come to the sensitive child from saying what is false are those of fear, fear of those terrific penalties which religious teaching attaches to the lying tongue. It seems likely that childish devices for allaying their qualms when saying what is untrue are intended somehow to make things right with God, and so to avoid the dreaded chastisement. I am sure, too, that the subsequent remorse, especially at night, is very largely a dread of some awful manifestation of God's wrath.

While I should set down much of this horror of children at discovering themselves liars to a dread of supernatural penalties, I should not set down the whole. I am disposed to think that there is another force at work in the little people's consciousness.

In order to explain what I mean, I must begin by saying that a tendency towards conscious falsehood, though common, does not seem to be universal among children. Several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously put forth an untruth. I can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose.

I am ready to go further and to suggest that where a child is brought up normally, that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends, quite apart from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth. One may easily see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the signs of a moral shock when they are confronted with a false statement. I remember after more than twelve years one little boy's outbreaks of righteous indignation at meeting with untrue statements about his beloved horses and other things in one of his books, for which he had all a child's reverence. The idea of knowingly perpetrating an untruth, so far as I can judge, is simply awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to the practice of truthful statement. May it, then, not well be that when a preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching sense of having violated law—law not wholly imposed by the mother's command, but rooted in the very habits of social life?

Our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will develop into the vices of cruelty and lying. On the other hand it has shown us that there are other and counteracting impulses, germs of human sympathy and of respect for the binding custom of truthfulness. So far from saying that child-nature is utterly bad or beautifully perfect, we should say that it is a disorderly jumble of impulses, each pushing itself upwards in lively contest with the others, some towards what is bad, others towards what is good. It is on this motley group of tendencies that the hand of the moral cultivator has to work, selecting, arranging, organising into a beautiful whole.