Jean Paul says if “Pas trop gouverner” is the best rule in politics, it is equally true of discipline.

But if the child is unhappy who has none of his rights respected, equally wretched is the little despot who has more than his own rights, who has never been taught to respect the rights of others, and whose only conception of the universe is that of an absolute monarchy in which he is sole ruler.

“Children rarely love those who spoil them, and never trust them.  Their keen young sense detects the false note in the character and draws its own conclusions, which are generally very just.”

The very best theoretical statement of a wise disciplinary method that I know is Herbert Spencer’s.  “Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our political rule; at the outset, autocratic control, where control is really needful; by and by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive extensions of this liberty of the subject; gradually ending in parental abdication.”

We must not expect children to be too good; not any better than we ourselves, for example; no, nor even as good.  Beware of hothouse virtue.  “Already most people recognize the detrimental results of intellectual precocity; but there remains to be recognized the truth that there is a moral precocity which is also detrimental.  Our higher moral faculties, like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex.  By consequence, they are both comparatively late in their evolution.  And with the one as with the other, a very early activity produced by stimulation will be at the expense of the future character.”

In these matters the child has a right to expect examples.  He lives in the senses; he can only learn through object lessons, can only pass from the concrete example of goodness to a vision of abstract perfection.

  “O’er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule. 
  And sun thee in the light of happy faces? 
  Love, Hope and Patience, these must be thy graces,
  And in thine own heart let them first keep school.”

Yes, “in thine own heart let them first keep school!” I cannot see why Max O’Rell should have exclaimed with such unction that if he were to be born over again he would choose to be an American woman.  He has never tried being one.  He does not realize that she not only has in hand the emancipation of the American woman, but the reformation of the American man and the education of the American child.  If that triangular mission in life does not keep her out of mischief and make her the angel of the twentieth century, she is a hopeless case.

Spencer says, “It is a truth yet remaining to be recognized that the last stage in the mental development of each man and woman is to be reached only through the proper discharge of the parental duties.  And when this truth is recognized, it will be seen how admirable is the ordination in virtue of which human beings are led by their strongest affections to subject themselves to a discipline which they would else elude.”