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 fiber 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 can not be exacted. On the other hand, a parent can not be more foolish than to discourage a spontaneous out-going 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 endeavor to help him by bringing fuel, an endeavor 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 can not easily be summarized, 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 behavior; and this not by a foolish vehemence of inculcation, but by a quiet, skillful 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 realize 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.
