The Struggle with Law.

In the last chapter we tried to get at those tendencies of child-nature which though they have a certain moral significance may in a manner be called spontaneous and independent of the institution of moral training. We will now examine the child’s attitude towards the moral government with which he finds himself confronted.

Here again we meet with opposite views. Children, say some, are essentially disobedient and law-breaking. A child as such is a rebel, delighting in nothing so much as in evading the rule which he finds imposed on him by others.

The view that children are instinctively obedient and law-abiding, has not, I think, been very boldly insisted on. A follower of Rousseau, at least, who sees only clumsy interference with natural development in our attempts to govern children, would say that child-nature must resist the artificial and cramping system which the disciplinarian imposes.

It seems, however, to be allowed by some that a certain number of children are docile and disposed to accept authority with its commands. According to these, children are either obedient or disobedient. This is perhaps the view of many mothers and pedagogues.

Here, too, it is probable that we try to make nature too simple. Even the latter view, in spite of its apparent wish to be discriminating, does not allow for the many-sidedness of the child, and for the many different ways in which the instincts of child-nature may vary.

Now it is worth asking whether, if the child were naturally disposed to look on authority as something wholly hostile, he would get morally trained at all. Physically mastered and morally cowed he might of course become; but this is not the same thing as being morally induced into a habit of accepting law and obeying it.

In inquiring into this matter we must begin by drawing a distinction. There is first the attitude of a child towards the governor, the parent or other guardian, and there is his attitude towards law as such. These are by no means the same thing, and a child of three or four begins to illustrate the distinction. He may seem to be lawless, opposed to the very idea of government, when in reality he is merely objecting to a particular ruler, and the kind of rule (or as the child would say, misrule) which he is carrying out.

Let us look a little into the non-compliant, disobedient attitude of children. As we have seen, their very liveliness, the abundance of their vigorous impulses, brings them into conflict with others’ wills. The ruler, more particularly, is a great and continual source of crossings and checkings. The child has his natural wishes and propensities. He is full of fun, bent on his harmless tricks, and the mother has to talk seriously to him about being naughty. How can we wonder at his disliking the constraint? He has a number of inconvenient, active impulses, such as putting things in disorder, playing with water, and so forth. As we all know, he has a duck-like fondness for dirty puddles. Civilisation, which wills that a child should be nicely dressed and clean, intervenes in the shape of the nurse and soon puts a stop to this mode of diversion. The tyro in submission, if sound in brain and limb, kicks against the restraint, yells, slaps the nurse, and so forth.

Such collisions are perfectly normal in the first years of life. We should not care to see a child give up his inclinations at another’s bidding without some little show of resistance. These conflicts are frequent and sharp in proportion to the sanity and vigour of the child. The best children, best from a biological point of view, have, I think, most of the rebel in them. Not infrequently these resistances of young will to old will are accompanied by more emphatic protests in the shape of slapping, pushing, and even biting. The ridiculous inequality in bodily powers, however, saves, or ought to save, the contest from becoming a serious physical struggle. The resistance where superior force is used can only resolve itself into a helpless protest, a vain shrieking or other utterance of checked and baffled impulse.

If instead of physical compulsion authority is asserted in the shape of a highly disagreeable command, a child, before obedience has grown into a habit, will be likely to disobey. If the nurse, instead of pulling the mite away from the puddle, bids him come away, he may assert himself in an eloquent ‘I won’t,’ or less bluntly, ‘I can’t come yet’. If he is very much in love with the puddle, and has a stout heart, he probably embarks on a tussle of words, in which ‘I won’t,’ or as the child will significantly put it ‘I mustn’t,’ is bandied with ‘you must!’ the nurse having at length to abandon the ‘moral’ method and to resort after all to physical compulsion.

Our sample-child has not, we will assume, yet got so far as to recognise and defer to a general rule about cleanliness. Hence it may be said that his opposition is directed against the nurse as propounding a particular command, and one which at the moment is excessively unpleasant. It is as yet not resistance to law as such, but rather to one specific interference of another will.

At the same time we may detect in some of this early resistance to authority something of the true rebel-nature, that is to say the love of lawlessness, and what is worse, perhaps, the obstinate recklessness of the law-breaker. The very behaviour of a child when another will crosses and blocks the line of his activity is suggestive of this. The yelling and other disorderly proceedings, do not they speak of the temper of the rioter, of the rowdy? And then, the fierce persistence in disobedience under rebuke, and the wild, wicked determination to face everything rather than obey, are not these marks of an almost Satanic fierceness of revolt? The thoroughly naughty child sticks at nothing. Thus a little offender of four when he was reminded by his sister—two years older—that he would be shut out from heaven retorted impiously, ‘I don’t care,’ adding: ‘Uncle won’t go—I’ll stay with him’.^[192]

This fierce noisy utterance of the disobedient and law-resisting temper is eminently impressive. Yet it is not the only utterance. If we observe children who may be said to show on the whole an outward submission to authority we shall discover signs of secret dissatisfaction and antagonism. The conflict with rule has not wholly ceased: it has simply changed its manner of proceeding, physical assault and riotous shouts of defiance being now exchanged for dialectic attack.

A curious chapter in the psychology of the child which still has to be written is the account of the various devices by which the astute little novice called upon to wear the yoke of authority seeks to smooth its chafing asperities. These devices may, perhaps, be summed up under the head of “trying it on”.

One of the simplest and most obvious of these contrivances is the extempore invention of an excuse for not instantly obeying a particular command. A child soon finds out that to say ‘I won’t’ when he is bidden to do something is indiscreet as well as vulgar. He wants to have his own way without resorting to a gross breach of good manners, so he replies insinuatingly, ‘I’s very sorry, but I’s too busy,’ or in some such conciliatory words. This field of invention offers a fine opportunity for the imaginative child. A small boy of three years and nine months on receiving from his nurse the familiar order, “Come here!” at once replied, “I can’t, nurse, I’s looking for a flea,” and pretended to be much engrossed in the momentous business of hunting for this quarry in the blanket of his cot.^[193] The little trickster is such a lover of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a case like this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told, laughed mischievously as he proffered his excuse. Such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as the uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is hard to be quite as much put out by them.

These excuses often show a fine range of inventive activity. How manifold, for example, are the reasons, more or less fictitious, which a boy when told to make less noise is able to urge in favour of non-compliance. Here, of course, all the great matters of the play-world, the need of getting his ‘gee-gee’ on, of giving his orders to his soldiers, and so forth, come in between the prohibition and compliance, and disobedience in such cases has its excuses. For to the child his play-world, even though in a manner modelled on the pattern of our common world, is apart and sacred; and the conventional restraints as to noise and such like borrowed from the every-day world seem to him to be quite out of place in this free and private domain of his own.

We all know the child’s aptness in ‘easing’ the pressure of commands and prohibitions. If, for example, he is told to keep perfectly quiet because mother or father wants to sleep, he will prettily plead for the reservation of whispering ever so softly. If he is bidden not to ask for things at the table he will resort to sly indirect reminders of what he wants, as when a boy of five and a half years whispered audibly: ‘I hope somebody will offer me some more soup,’ or when a girl of three and a half years, with still greater childish tact, observed on seeing the elder folk eating cake: ‘I not asking’. This last may be compared with a story told by Rousseau of a little girl of six years who, having eaten of all the dishes but one, artfully indicated the fact by pointing in turn to each of the dishes, saying: ‘I have eaten that,’ but carefully passing by the untasted one.^[194] When more difficult duties come to be enforced and the neophyte in the higher morality is bidden to be considerate for others, and even to sacrifice his own comfort for theirs, he is apt to manifest a good deal of skill in adjusting the counsel of perfection to young weakness. Here is an amusing example. A little boy, Edgar by name, aged five and three-quarter years, was going out to take tea with some little girls. His mother, as is usual on such occasions, primed him with special directions as to behaviour, saying: “Remember to give way to them like father does to me”. To which Edgar, after thinking a brief instant, replied: “Oh, but not all at once. You have to persuade him.”

A like astuteness will show itself in meeting accusation. The various ways in which a child will seek to evade the point in such cases are truly marvellous and show the childish intelligence at its ablest.

Sometimes the dreary talking to, with its well-known deep accusatory tones, its familiar pleadings, ‘How can you be so naughty?’ and the rest is daringly ignored. After keeping up an excellent appearance of listening the little culprit will proceed in the most artless way to talk about something more agreeable. This is trying, but is not the worst. The deepest depth of maternal humiliation is reached when a carefully prepared and solemnly delivered homily is rewarded by a tu quoque in the shape of a correction of something in the delivery which offends the child’s sense of propriety. This befel one mother who, after talking seriously to her little boy about some fault, was met with this remark: “Mamma, when you talk you don’t move your upper jaw”.

It is of course difficult to say how far a child’s interruptions and what look like turnings of the conversation when receiving rebuke are the result of deliberate plotting. We know it is hard to hold the young thoughts long on any subject, and the homily makes a heavy demand in this respect, and its theme is apt to seem dull to a child’s lively brain. The thoughts will be sure to wander then, and the rude interruptions and digressions may after all be but the natural play of the young mind. I fear, however, that design often has a hand here. The first digression to which the weak disciplinarian succumbed may have been the result of a spontaneous flow of childish ideas: but its success enables the observant child to try it on a second time with artful aim.

In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, the small wits are busy discovering palliatives and exculpations. Here we have the many ruses, often crude enough, by which the little culprit tries to shake off moral responsibility, to deny the authorship of the action found fault with. The blame is put on anybody or anything. When he breaks something, say a cup, and is scolded, he saves himself by saying it was because the cup was not made strong enough, or because the maid put it too near the edge of the table. There are clear indications of fatalistic thought in these childish disclaimers. Things were so conditioned that he could not help doing what he did. This fatalism betrays itself in the childish subterfuges already referred to, by which the ego tries to screen itself shabbily by throwing responsibility on to the bodily agents. This device is sometimes hit upon very early. A wee child of two when told not to cry gasped out: "Elsie cry—not Elsie cry—tears cry—naughty tears!" This, it must be allowed, is more plausible than C.’s lame attempt to put off responsibility for some naughty action on his hands. For our tears are in a sense apart from us, and in the first years are wholly beyond control.

The fatalistic form of exculpation meets us later on under the familiar form, ‘God made me like that’. A boy of three was blamed for leaving his crusts, and his conduct contrasted with that of his model papa. Whereupon he observed with a touch of metaphysical precocity: “Yes, but, papa, you see God had made you and me different”.

These denials of authorship occur when a charge is brought home and no clear justification of the action is forthcoming. In many cases the shrewd intelligence of the child—which is never so acute as in this art of moral self-defence—discovers justificatory reasons. In such a case the attitude is a very different one. It is no longer the helpless lifting of hands of the irresponsible one, but the bold steady glance of one who is prepared to defend his action.

Sometimes these justifications are pitiful examples of quibbling. A boy had been rough with his baby brother. His mother chid him, telling him he might hurt baby. He then asked his mother, ‘Isn’t he my own brother?’ and on his mother admitting so incontestable a proposition, exclaimed triumphantly, “Well, you said I could do what I liked with my own things”. The idea of the precious baby being a boy’s own to do what he likes with is so remote from older people’s conceptions that it seems impossible to credit the boy with misunderstanding. We ought, perhaps, to set him down as a depraved little sophist and destined—but predictions happily lie outside our mÉtier.

In some cases these justifications have a dreadful look of being after-thoughts invented for the express purpose of self-protection and knowingly put forward as fibs. Yet there is need of a wise discrimination here. Take, for example, the following from the Worcester Collection. A boy of three was told by his mother to stay and mind his baby-sister while she went downstairs. On going up again some time after she met him on the stairs. “Being asked why he had left the baby he said there was a bumble-bee in the room and he was afraid he would get stung if he stayed there. His mother asked him if he wasn’t afraid his little sister would get stung. He said, ‘Yes,’ but added that if he stayed in the room the bee might sting them both, and then she would have two to take care of.” Now with every wish to be charitable I cannot bring myself to think that the small boy had really gone through that subtle process of disinterested calculation before vacating the room in favour of the bumble-bee, if indeed there was a bumble-bee. To be caught in the act and questioned is, I suspect, a situation particularly productive of such specious fibbing.

One other illustration of this keen childish dialectic when face to face with the accuser deserves to be touched on. The sharp little wits have something of a lawyer’s quickness in detecting a flaw in the indictment. Any exaggeration into which a feeling of indignation happens to betray the accuser is instantly pounced upon. If, for example, a child is scolded for pulling kitty’s ears and making her cry it is enough for the little stickler for accuracy to be able to say: ‘I wasn’t pulling kitty’s ears, I was only pulling one of her ears’. This ability to deny the charge in its initial form gives the child a great advantage, and robs the accusation in its amended form of much of its sting. Whence, by the way, one may infer that wisdom in managing children shows itself in nothing more than in a scrupulous exactness in the use of words.

While there are these isolated attacks on various points of the daily discipline, we see now and again a bolder line of action in the shape of a general protest against its severity. Children have been known to urge that the punishments inflicted on them are ineffectual; and, although their opinion on such matters is hardly disinterested, it is sometimes pertinent enough. An American boy aged five years ten months began to cry because he was forbidden to go into the yard to play, and was threatened by his mother with a whipping. Whereupon he observed: “Well now, mamma, that will only make me cry more”.

These childish protests are, as we know, wont to be met by the commonplaces about the affection which prompts the correction. But the child finds it hard to swallow these subtleties. For him love is love, that is caressing, and doing everything for his present enjoyment; and here is the mother who says she loves him, and often acts as if she did, transforming herself into an ogre to torment him and make him miserable. He may accept her assurance that she scolds and chastises him because she is a good mother; only he is apt to wish that she were a shade less good. A boy of four had one morning to remain in bed till ten o’clock as a punishment for misbehaviour. He proceeded to address his mother in this wise: "If I had any little children I’d be a worse mother than you—I’d be quite a bad mother; I’d let the children get up directly I had done my breakfast at any rate". If, on the other hand, the mother puts forward her own comfort as the ground of the restraint she may be met by this kind of thing: “I wish you’d be a little more self-sacrificing and let me make a noise”.

Enough has been said to illustrate the ways in which the natural child kicks against the imposition of restraints on his free activity. He begins by showing himself an open foe to authority. For a long time after, while making a certain show of submission, he harbours in his breast something of the rebel’s spirit. He does his best to evade the most galling parts of the daily discipline, and displays an admirable ingenuity in devising excuses for apparent acts of insubordination. Where candour is permitted he is apt to prove himself an exceedingly acute critic of the system which is imposed on him.

All this, moreover, seems to show that a child objects not only to the particular administration under which he happens to live, but to all law as implying restraints on free activity. Thus, from the child’s point of view, so far as we have yet examined it, punishment as such is a thing which ought not to be.

So strong and deep-reaching is this antagonism to law and its restraints apt to be that the childish longing to be ‘big’ is, I believe, grounded on the expectation of liberty. To be big seems to the child more than anything else to be rid of all this imposition of commands, to be able to do what one likes without interference from others. This longing may grow intense in the breast of a quite small child. “Do you know,” asked a little fellow of four years, “what I shall do when I’m a big man? I’ll go to a shop and buy a bun and pick out all the currants.” This funny story is characteristic of the movements of young desire. The small prohibition not to pick out the currants is one that may chafe to soreness a child’s sensibility.

On the Side of Law.

If, however, we look closer we shall find that this hostility is not the whole, perhaps not the most fundamental part of the child’s attitude. It is evident, to begin with, that a good deal of this early criticism of parental government, so far from implying rejection of all rule, plainly implies its acceptance. Some of the earliest and bitterest protests against interference are directed against what looks to the child irregular or opposed to law. He is allowed, for example, for some time to use a pair of scissors as a plaything, and is then suddenly deprived of it, his mother having now first discovered the unsuitability of the plaything. In such a case the passionate outburst and the long bitter protest attest the sense of injustice, the violation of custom and unwritten law. Again, the keen resentful opposition of the child to the look of anything like unfairness and partiality in parental government shows that he has a jealous feeling of regard for the universality and the inviolableness of law. Much, too, of the criticism dealt with above, reveals a fundamental acknowledgment of law—at least for the purposes of the argument. Thus the very attempt to establish an excuse, a justification, may be said to be a tacit admission that if the action had been done as alleged it would have been naughty and deserving of punishment. In truth the small person’s challengings of the modus operandi of his mother’s rule, just because they are often in a true sense ethical, clearly start from the assumption of rules, and of the distinction of right and wrong.

This of itself shows that there are in the child compliant as well as non-compliant tendencies towards law and towards authority so far as this is lawful. We may now pass to other parts of a child’s behaviour which help to make more clear the existence of such law-abiding impulses.

Here we may set out with those exhibitions of something like remorse which often follow disobedience and punishment in the first tender years. These may, at first, be little more than physical reactions, due to the exhaustion of the passionate outbursts. But they soon begin to show traces of new feelings. A child in disgrace, before he has a clear moral sense of shame, suffers through a feeling of estrangement, of loneliness, of self-restriction. If the habitual relation between mother and child is a loving and happy one the situation becomes exceedingly painful. The pride and obstinacy notwithstanding, the culprit feels that he is cut off from more than one half of his life, that his beautiful world is laid in ruins. The same little boy who said: ‘I’d be a worse mother,’ remarked to his mother a few months later that if he could say what he liked to God it would be: ‘Love me when I’m naughty’. I think one can hardly conceive of a more eloquent testimony to the suffering of the child in the lonesome, loveless state of punishment.

Is there any analogue of our sense of remorse in this early suffering? The question of an instinctive moral sense in children is a perplexing one, and I do not propose to discuss it now. I would only venture to suggest that in these poignant griefs of child-life there seem to be signs of a consciousness of violated instincts. This is, no doubt, in part the smarting of a loving heart on remembering its unloving action. But there may be more than this. A child of four or five is, I conceive, quite capable of reflecting at such a time that in his fits of naughtiness he has broken with his normal orderly self, that he has set at defiance that which he customarily honours and obeys.

What, it may be asked, are these instincts? In their earliest discernible form they seem to me to be respect for rule, for a regular manner of proceeding as opposed to an irregular. A child, as I understand the little sphinx, is at once the subject of ever-changing caprices—whence the delight in playful defiance of all rule and order—and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule. And, as I conceive, this reverence for precedent and rule is the deeper and stronger, holding full sway in his serious moments.

If this view is correct the suffering of naughty children is not, as has been said by some, wholly the result of the externals of discipline, punishment, and the loss of the agreeable things which follow good behaviour, though this is commonly an element; nor is it merely the sense of loneliness and lovelessness, though that is probably a large slice of it; but it contains the germ of something nearer a true remorse, viz., a sense of normal feelings and dispositions set at nought and contradicted.

And now we may ask what evidence there is for the existence of this respect for order and regularity other than that afforded by the childish protests against apparent inconsistencies in the administration of discipline.

Mr. Walter Bagehot tells us that the great initial difficulty in the formation of communities was the fixing of custom. However this be in the case of primitive communities it seems to me indisputable that in the case of a child brought up in normal surroundings there is a clearly observable instinct to fall in with a common mode of behaviour.

This respect for custom is related to the imitative instincts of the child. He does what he sees others do, and so tends to fall in with their manner of life. We all know that these small people take their cue from their elders as to what is allowable. Hence one difficulty of moral training. A little boy when two years and one month old had happened to see his mother tear a piece of calico. The next day he was discovered to have taken the sheet from the bed and made a rent in it. When scolded, he replied in his childish German, ‘Mamma mach put,’ i.e., ‘macht caput’ (breaks calico). It is well when the misleading effect of ‘example’ is so little serious as it was in this case.

In addition to this effect of others’ doings in making things allowable in the child’s eyes, there is the binding influence of a repeated regular manner of proceeding. This is the might of ‘custom’ in the full sense of the term, the force which underlies all a child’s conceptions of ‘right’. In spite of the difficulties of moral training, of drilling children into orderly habits—and I do not lose sight of these—it may confidently be said that they have an inbred respect for what is customary, and wears the appearance of a rule of life. Nor is this, I believe, altogether a reflexion, by imitation, of others’ orderly ways, and of the system of rules which is imposed on him by others. I am quite ready to admit that the institution of social life, the regular procession of the daily doings of the house, aided by the system of parental discipline, has much to do with fixing the idea of orderliness and regularity in the child’s mind. Yet I believe the facts point to something more, to an innate disposition to follow precedent and rule, which precedes education, and is one of the forces to which education can appeal. This disposition has its roots in habit, which is apparently a law of all life: but it is more than the blind impulse of habit, since it is reflective and rational, and implies a recognition of the universal.

The first crude manifestation of this disposition to make rule, to rationalise life by subjecting it to a general method, is seen in those actions which seem little more than the working of habit, the insistence on the customary lines of procedure at meals and such like. A mother writes that her boy when five years old was quite a stickler for punctilious order in these matters. His cup and spoon had to be put in precisely the right place, the sequences of the day, as the lesson before the walk, the walk before bed, had to be rigorously observed. Any breach of the customary was apt to be resented as a sort of impiety. This may be an extreme instance, but my observation leads me to say that such punctiliousness is not uncommon. What is more, I have seen it developing itself where the system of parental government was by no means characterised by severe insistence on such minutiÆ of order. And this would seem to show that it cannot wholly be set down to the influences of such government. It seems rather to be a spontaneous extension of the realm of rule or law.

This impulse to extend rule appears more plainly in many of the little ceremonial observances of the child. Very charmingly is this respect for rule exhibited in relation to his animals, dolls and other pets. Not only are they required to do things in a proper orderly manner, but people have to treat them with due deference.

I have quoted at length this careful bit of maternal observation because it seems to indicate so clearly a spontaneous extension of a custom. The practice of the mother and father in kissing him was generalised into a rule of ceremony in the treatment of all inferiors.

This subject of childish ceremonial is a curious one, and deserves a more careful study. It is hardly less interesting than the origin and survival of adult ceremonial, as elucidated by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The respect for orderly procedure on all serious occasions, and especially at church, is as exacting as that of any savage tribe. Punch illustrated this some years ago by a picture of a little girl asking her mamma if Mr. So and So was not a very wicked man, because he didn’t “smell his hat” when he came into his pew.

This jealous regard for ceremony and the proprieties of behaviour is seen in the enforcement of rules of politeness by children who will extend them far beyond the scope intended by the parent. A delightful instance of this fell under my own observation, as I was walking on Hampstead Heath. It was a spring day, and the fat buds of the chestnuts were bursting into magnificent green plumes. Two well-dressed ‘misses,’ aged, I should say, about nine and eleven, were taking their correct morning walk. The elder called the attention of the younger to one of the trees, pointing to it. The younger exclaimed in a highly shocked tone: “Oh, Maud (or was it ‘Mabel’?), you know you shouldn’t point!” The notion of perpetrating a rudeness on the chestnut tree was funny enough. But the incident is instructive as illustrating the childish tendency to stretch and generalise rules to the utmost.

The domain of prayer well illustrates the same tendency. The child envisages God as a very, very grand person, and naturally, therefore, extends to him all the courtesies he knows of. Thus he must be addressed politely with the due forms ‘Please,’ ‘If you please,’ and so forth. The German child shrinks from using the familiar form ‘Du’ in his prayers. As one maiden of seven well put it in reply to a question why she used ‘Sie’ in her prayers: “Ich werde doch den lieben Gott nicht Du nennen: ich kenne ihn ja gar nicht”. Again, a child feels that he must not worry or bore God (children generally find out that some people look on them as bores), or treat him with any kind of disrespect. C. objected to his sister’s remaining so long at her prayers, apparently on the ground that, as God knew what she had to say, her much talking would be likely to bore him. An American boy of four on one occasion refused to say his prayers, explaining, “Why, they’re old. God has heard them so many times that they are old to him too. Why, he knows them as well as I do myself.” On the other hand, God must not be kept waiting. “Oh, mamma,” said a little boy of three years eight months (the same that was so insistent about the kissing and hand-shaking), “how long you have kept me awake for you; God has been wondering so whenever I was going to say my prayers.” All the words must be nicely said to him. A little boy, aged four and three-quarter years, once stopped in the middle of a prayer and asked his mother: “Oh! how do you spell that word?” The question is curious as suggesting that the child may have envisaged his silent communications to the far-off King as a letter. In any case, it showed painstaking and the wish not to offend by slovenliness of address.

Not only do children thus of themselves extend the scope and empire of rule, they show a disposition to make rules for themselves. If a child that is told to do a thing on a single occasion only is found repeating the action on other occasions, this seems to show the germ of a law-making impulse. A little boy of two years one month was once told to give a lot of old toys to the children of the gardener. Some time after, on receiving some new toys, he put away his old ones as before for the less fortunate children. Every careful observer of children knows that they are apt to proceed this way, to erect particular actions and suggestions into precedents. This tendency gives something of the amusing priggishness to the ways of childhood.

There is little doubt, I think, that this respect for proper orderly behaviour, for precedent and general rule, forms a vital element in the child’s submission to parental law. In fixing our attention on occasional acts of disobedience and lawlessness we are apt to overlook the ease, the absence of friction with which normal children, if only decently trained, fall in with the larger part of our observances and ordinances.

That the instinct for order does assist moral discipline may be seen in the fact that children are apt to pay enormous deference to our rules. Nothing is more suggestive here than the talk of children among themselves, the emphasis they are wont to lay on the ‘must’ and ‘must not’. The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law: a rule is apt to present itself to their imagination as a thing supremely sacred and awful before which it prostrates itself.

This recognition of the absolute imperativeness of a rule properly laid down by the recognised authority is seen in children’s jealous insistence on the observance of the rule in their own case and in that of others. As has been observed by Preyer a child of two years eight months will follow out the prohibitions of the mother when he falls into other hands, sternly protesting, for example, against the nurse giving him the forbidden knife at table. Very proper children rather like to instruct their aunts and other ignorant persons as to the right way of dealing with them, and will rejoice in the opportunity of setting them right even when it means a deprivation for themselves. The self-denying ordinance: ‘Mamma doesn’t let me have many sweets,’ is by no means beyond the powers of such a child. One can see here, no doubt, traces of a childish sense of self-importance, a feeling of the much-waited-on little sovereign for what befits his supreme worth. Yet, allowing for such elements, there seems to me to be in this behaviour a residue of genuine respect for parental law.

These carryings out of the parental behest when entrusted to other hands are instructive as suggesting that the child feels the constraining force of the command when its author is no longer present to enforce it. Perhaps a clearer evidence of respect for the law as such, apart from its particular enforcement by the parent, is supplied by children’s way of extending the rules laid down for their own behaviour to that of others. This point has already been illustrated in the tendency to universalise the observances of courtesy and the like. No trait is better marked in the normal child than the impulse to subject others to his own disciplinary system. In truth, children are for the most part particularly alert disciplinarians. With what amusing severity are they wont to lay down the law to their dolls, and their animal playmates, subjecting them to precisely the same prohibitions and punishments as those to which they themselves are subject! Nor do they stop here. They enforce the duties just as courageously on their human elders. A mite of eighteen months went up to her elder sister, who was crying, and with perfect mimicry of the nurse’s corrective manner, said: “Hush! Hush! papa!” pointing at the same time to the door. The little girl M. when twenty-two months old was disappointed because a certain Mr. G. did not call. In the evening she said: "Mr. D. not did tum—was very naughty, Mr. D. have to be whipped". So natural and inevitable to the intelligence of a child does it seem that the system of restraints, rebukes, punishments under which he lives should have universal validity.

This judicial bent of the child is a curious one and often develops a priggish fondness for setting others morally straight. Small boys have to endure much in this way from the hands of slightly older sisters proficient in matters of law and delighting to enforce the moralities. But sometimes the sisters lapse into naughtiness, and then the small boys have their chance. They too can on such occasions be priggish if not downright hypocritical. A little boy had been quarrelling with his sister named Muriel just before going to bed. When he was undressed he knelt down to say his prayers, Muriel sitting near and listening. He prayed (audibly) in this wise: “Please, God, make Muriel a good girl,” then looked up and said in an angry voice, “Do you hear that, Muriel?” and after this digression resumed his petition. I believe fathers when reading family prayers have been known to apply portions of Scripture in this personal manner to particular members of the family; and it is even possible that extempore prayers have been invented, as by this little prig of a boy, for the purpose of administering a sort of back-handed corrective blow to an erring neighbour.

This mania for correction shows itself too in relation to the authorities themselves. A collection of rebukes and expositions of moral precept supplied by children to their erring parents would be amusing and suggestive. As was illustrated above, a child is especially keen to spy faults in his governors when they are themselves administering authority. Here is another example: A boy of two—the moral instruction of parents by the child begins betimes—would not go to sleep when bidden to do so by his father and mother. At length the father, losing patience, addressed him with a man’s fierce emphasis. This mode of admonition so far from cowering the child simply offended his sense of propriety, for he rejoined: “You s’ouldn’t s’ouldn’t, Assum (i.e., ‘Arthur,’ the father’s name), you s’ould speak nicely”.

The lengths to which a child with the impulse of moral correction strong in him will sometimes go, are quite appalling. One evening a little girl of six had been repeating the Lord’s prayer. When she had finished, she looked up and said: ‘I don’t like that prayer, you ought not to ask for bread, and all that greediness, you ought only to ask for goodness!’ There is probably in this an imitative reproduction of something which the child had been told by her mother, or had overheard. Yet allowing for this, one cannot but recognise a quite alarming degree of precocious moral priggishness.

We may now turn to what my readers will probably regard as still clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, viz., their voluntary submission to its commands. We are apt to think of these little ones as doing right only under external compulsion. But although a child of four may be far from attaining to the state of ‘autonomy of will’ or self-legislation spoken of by the philosopher, he may show a germ of such free adoption of law. It is possible that we see the first faint traces of this in a small child’s way of giving orders to, rebuking, and praising himself. The little girl M., when only twenty months old, would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself: ‘Tay dar’ (stay there). About the same time, after being naughty and squealing ‘like a railway-whistle,’ she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, ‘Be dood, Babba’ (her name). At the age of twenty-two months she had been in the garden and misbehaving by treading on the box border, so that she had to be carried away by her mother. After confessing her fault she wanted to go into the garden again, and promised, ‘Babba will not be naughty adain’. When she was out she looked at the box, saying, “If oo (you) do dat I shall have to take oo in, Babba”. Here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the external control, but they seem to me to indicate a movement in the direction of self-control.

Very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our discipline. The little girl M. when less than two years old, would go to her mother and confess some piece of naughtiness and suggest the punishment. A little boy aged two years and four months was deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for scribbling on the wall-paper. His punishment was, however, tempered by permission to draw when taken downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a picture downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse fetched him she wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected, saying: “No Nana (name for nurse) look at it till Sunday”. And sure enough when Sunday came, and the pencil was restored to him, he promptly showed nurse his picture. This is an excellent observation full of suggestion as to the way in which a child’s mind works. Among other things it seems to show pretty plainly that the little fellow looked on the nursery and all its belongings, including the nurse, during those three days as a place of disgrace into which the privileges of the artist were not to enter. He was allowed the indulgence of drawing downstairs, but he had no right to exhibit his workmanship to the nurse, who was inseparably associated in his mind with the forbidden nursery drawing. Thus a process of genuine child-thought led to a self-instituted extension of the punishment.

A month later this child "pulled down a picture in the nursery"—the nursery walls seem to have had a fell attraction for him—“by standing on a sofa and tugging till the wire broke. He was alone at the time and very much frightened though not hurt. He was soothed and told to leave the picture alone in future, but was not in any way rebuked. He seemed, however, to think that some punishment was necessary, for he presently asked whether he was going to have a certain favourite frock on that afternoon. He was told ‘No’ (the reason being that the day was wet or something similar) and he said immediately: ‘’Cause Neil pulled picture down?’” Here I think we have unmistakable evidence of an expectation of punishment as the fit and proper sequel in a case which, though it did not exactly resemble those already branded by it, was felt in a vague way to be disorderly and naughty.

Such stories of expectation of punishment are capped by instances of correction actually inflicted by the child on himself. I believe it is not uncommon for a child when possessed by a sense of having been naughty to object to having nice things at table on the ground that previously on a like occasion he was deprived of them. But the most curious instance of this moral rigour towards self which I have met with is the following: A girl of nine had been naughty, and was very sorry for her misbehaviour. Shortly after she came to her lesson limping, and remarked that she felt very uncomfortable. Being asked by her governess what was the matter with her she said: “It was very naughty of me to disobey you, so I put my right shoe on to my left foot and my left shoe on to my right foot”.

The facts here briefly illustrated seem to me to show that there is in the child from the first a rudiment of true law-abidingness. And this is a force of the greatest consequence to the disciplinarian. It is something which takes side in the child’s breast with the reasonable governor and the laws which he or she administers. It secures ready compliance with a large part of the discipline enforced. When the impulse urging towards licence has been too strong, and disobedience ensues, this same instinct comes to the aid of order and good conduct by inflicting pains which are the beginning of what we call remorse.

By-and-by other forces will assist. The affectionate child will reflect on the misery his disobedience causes his mother. A boy of four and three-quarter years must, one supposes, have woke up to this fact when he remarked to his mother: “Did you choose to be a mother? I think it must be rather tiresome.” The day when the child first becomes capable of thus putting himself into his mother’s place and realising, if only for an instant, the trouble he has brought on her, is an all-important one in his moral development.

The Wise Law-giver.

As our illustrations have suggested, and as every thoughtful parent knows well enough, the problem of moral training in the first years is full of difficulty. Yet our study surely suggests that it is not so hopeless a problem as we are sometimes weakly disposed to think. Perhaps a word or two on this may not inappropriately close this essay.

I will readily concede that the difficulty of inculcating in children a sweet and cheerful obedience arises partly from their nature. There are trying children, just as there are trying dogs that howl and make themselves disagreeable for no discoverable reason but their inherent ‘cussedness’. There are, I doubt not, conscientious painstaking mothers who have been baffled by having to manage what appears to be the utterly unmanageable.

Yet I think that we ought to be very slow to pronounce any child unmanageable. I know full well that in the case of these small growing things there are all kinds of hidden physical commotions which breed caprices, ruffle the temper, and make them the opposite of docile. The peevish child who will do nothing, will listen to no suggestion, is assuredly a difficult subject to deal with. But such moodiness and cross-grainedness springing from bodily disturbances will be allowed for by the discerning mother, who will be too wise to bring the severer measures of discipline to bear on a child when subject to their malign influence. Waiving these disturbing factors, however, I should say that a good part, certainly more than one half, of the difficulty of training children is due to our clumsy bungling modes of going to work.

Sensible persons know that there is a good and a bad way of approaching a child. The wrong ways of trying to constrain children are, alas, numerous. I am not writing an ‘advice to parents,’ and am not called on therefore to deal with the much-disputed question of the rightness and wrongness of corporal punishment. Slaps may be needful in the early stages, even though they do lead to little tussles. A mother assures me that these battles with her several children have all fallen between the ages of sixteen months and two years. It is, however, conceivable that such fights might be avoided altogether; yet a man should be chary of dogmatising on this delicate matter.

What is beyond doubt is that the slovenly discipline—if indeed discipline it is to be called—which consists in alternations of gushing fondness with almost savage severity, or fits of government and restraint interpolated between long periods of neglect and laisser faire, is precisely what develops the rebellious and law-resisting propensities. But discipline can be bad without being a stupid pretence. Everything in the shape of inconsistency, saying one thing at one time, another thing at another, or treating one child in one fashion, another in another, tends to undermine the pillars of authority. Young eyes are quick to note these little contradictions, and they sorely resent them. It is astonishing how careless disciplinarians can show themselves before these astute little critics. It is the commonest thing to tell a child to behave like his elders, forgetting that this, if indeed a rule at all, can only be one of very limited application. Here is a suggestive example of the effect of this sort of teaching sent me by a mother. “At three and a half, when some visitors were present, she was told not to talk at dinner-time. ‘Why me no talk? Papa talks.’ ‘Yes, but papa is grown up, and you are only a little girl; you can’t do just like grown-up people.’ She was silent for some time, but when I told her ten minutes later to sit nicely with her hands in her lap like her cousins, she replied, with a very humorous smile, ‘Me tan’t (can’t) sit like grown-up people, me is only a little girl’.”

We can fail and make children disloyal instead of loyal subjects by unduly magnifying our office, by insisting too much on our authority. Children who are over-ruled, who have no taste of being left unmolested and free to do what they like, can hardly be expected to submit graciously. Another way of carrying parental control to excess is by exacting displays of virtue which are beyond the moral capabilities of the child. A lady sends me this reminiscence of her childhood. She had been promised sixpence when she could play her scales without fault, and succeeded in the exploit on her sixth birthday. The sixpence was given to her, but soon after her mother suggested that she should spend the money in fruit to give to her (the mother’s) invalid friend. This was offending the sense of justice, for if the child is jealous of anything as his very own it is surely the reward he has earned; and was, moreover, a foolish attempt to call forth generosity where generosity was wholly out of place. An even worse example is that recorded by Ruskin. When a child he was expected to come down to dessert and crack nuts for the grand older folk while peremptorily forbidden to eat any. Such refined cruelties of government deserve to be defeated in their objects. Much of our ill success in governing children would probably turn out to be attributable to unwisdom in assigning tasks, and more particularly in making exactions which wound that sensitive fibre of a child’s heart, the sense of justice.

Parents are, I fear, apt to forget that generosity and the other liberal virtues owe their worth to their spontaneity. They may be suggested and encouraged but cannot be exacted. On the other hand, a parent cannot be more foolish than to discourage a spontaneous outgoing of good impulse, as if nothing were good but what emanated from a spirit of obedience. In a pretty and touching little American work, Beckonings from Little Hands, the writer describes the remorse of a father who, after his child’s death, recalled the little fellow’s first crude endeavour to help him by bringing fuel, an endeavour which, alas! he had met with something like a rebuff.

The right method of training, which develops and strengthens by bracing exercise the instinct of obedience, cannot easily be summarised; for it is the outcome of the highest wisdom. I may, however, be permitted to indicate one or two of its main features.

Informed at the outset by a fine moral feeling and a practical tact as to what ought to be expected, the wise mother is concerned before everything to make her laws appear as much a matter of course as the daily sequences of the home life, as unquestionable axioms of behaviour; and this not by a foolish vehemence of inculcation but by a quiet skilful inweaving of them into the order of the child’s world. To expect the right thing, as though the wrong thing were an impossibility, rather than to be always pointing out the wrong thing and threatening consequences; to make all her words and all her own actions support this view of the inevitableness of law; to meet any indications of a disobedient spirit, first with misunderstanding, and later with amazement; this is surely the first and fundamental matter.

The effectiveness of this discipline depends on the simple psychological principle that difficult actions tend to realise themselves in the measure in which the ideas of them become clear and persistent. Get a child steadily to follow out in thought an act to which he is disinclined and you have more than half mastered the disinclination. The quiet daily insistence of the wise rule of the nursery proceeds by setting up and maintaining the ideas of dutiful actions, and so excluding the thought of disobedient actions.

It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous to the action of suggestion upon the hypnotised subject. The mother, the right sort of mother, has on the child’s mind something of the subduing influence of the Nancy doctor: she induces ideas of particular actions, gives them force and persistence so that the young mind is possessed by them and they work themselves out into fulfilment as occasion arises.

In order that this effect of ‘obsession,’ or a full occupation of consciousness with the right idea, may result, certain precautions are necessary. As observant parents know, a child may be led by a prohibition to do the very thing he is bidden not to do. We have seen how readily a child’s mind moves from an affirmation to a corresponding negation, and conversely. The ‘contradictoriness’ of a child, his passion for saying the opposite of what you say, shows the same odd manner of working of the young mind. Wanting to do what he is told not to do is another effect of this “contrary suggestion,” as it has been called, aided of course by the child’s dislike of all constraint.^[195] If we want to avoid this effect of suggestion and to secure the direct effect, we must first of all acquire the difficult secret of personal influence, of the masterfulness which does not repel but attracts; and secondly try to reduce our forbiddings with their contrary suggestions to a minimum.

The action in moral training of this influence of a quasi-hypnotic suggestion becomes more clearly marked when difficulties occur; when some outbreak of wilful resistance has to be recognised and met, or some new and relatively arduous feat of obedience has to be initiated. Here I find that intelligent mothers have found their way to methods closely resembling those of the hypnotist. “When R. is naughty and in a passion (writes a lady friend of her child aged three and a half), I need only suggest to him that he is some one else, say a friend of his, and he will take it up at once, he will pretend to be the other child, and at last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.” This mode of suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself from and control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely employed in the moral training of children. Suggestion may work through the emotions. Merely to say, ‘Mother would like you to do this,’ is to set up an idea in the child’s consciousness by help of the sustaining force of his affection. “If (writes a lady) there was anything Lyle particularly wished not to do, his mother had only to say, ‘Dobbin (a sort of canonised toy-horse already referred to) would like you to do this,’ and it was done without a murmur.”

We have another analogue to hypnotic suggestion where a mother prepares her child some time beforehand for a difficult duty, telling him that she expects him to perform it. A mother writes that her boy, when about the age of two and a half years more particularly, was inclined to burst into loud but short fits of crying. “I have found (she says) these often checked by telling him beforehand what would be expected of him, and exacting a promise that he would do the thing cheerfully. I have seen his face flush up ready to cry when he remembered his promise and controlled himself.” This reminds one forcibly of the commands suggested by the hypnotiser to be carried into effect when the subject wakes. Much more, perhaps, might be done in this direction by choosing the right moments for setting up the persistent ideas in the child’s consciousness. I know a lady who got into the way of giving moral exhortation to her somewhat headstrong girl at night before the child fell asleep, and found this very effectual. It is possible that we may be able to apply this idea of preparatory and premunitory suggestion in new and surprising ways to difficult and refractory children.^[196]

One other way in which the wise mother will win the child over to duty is by developing his consciousness of freedom and power. A mother, who was herself a well-known writer for children, has recorded in some notes on her children that when one of her little girls had declined to accede to her wish she used to say to her: ‘Oh, yes, I think when you have remembered how pleasant it is to oblige others you will do it’. ‘I will think about it, mamma,’ the child would reply, laughing, and then go and hide her head behind a sofa-pillow which she called her ‘thinking corner’. In half a minute she would come out and say: “Oh, yes, mamma, I have thought about it and I will do it”. This strikes me as an admirable combination of regulative suggestion with exercise of the young will in moral decision. It gave the child the consciousness of using her own will, and yet maintained the needed measure of guidance and control.

As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings for such suggestive guidance will offer themselves. How valuable, for example, is the mother’s encouragement of the weakly child, shrinking from a difficult self-repressive action, when she says with inspiring voice: ‘You can do it if you try’. Thus pilot-like she conducts the little navigator out into the open main of duty where he will have to steer himself.

I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not beyond human powers. It has its strong supports in child-nature, and these, when there are wisdom and method on the ruler’s side, will secure success. I have not said that the trainer’s task is easy. So far from thinking this, I hold that a mother who bravely faces the problem, neither abandoning the wayward will to its own devices, nor, hardly less weakly, handing over the task of disciplining it to a paid substitute, and who by well-considered and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching the perfection I have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the tender and companionable parent, is among the few members of our species who are entitled to its reverence.

192. My correspondent, discreetly perhaps, does not explain why the uncle was selected as fellow-outcast.