“If I had been there, and had a gun, I would have shot him on the spot.”

The Rough Mode of Treatment.

Now, if the mother wishes to confuse and bewilder, and to crush down, so to speak, the reasoning faculties of her child, she may say,

“Nonsense, George!  It is of no use for you to talk big in that way.  You would not dare to fire a gun in such a case, still less, to shoot a man.  The first thing you would do would be to run away and hide.  And then, besides, it would be very wicked for you to kill a man in that way.  You would be very likely to get yourself hung for murder.  Besides, the Bible says that we must not resist evil; so you should not talk so coolly about shooting a man.”

The poor boy would be overpowered by such a rebuke as this, and perhaps silenced.  The incipient and half-formed ideas in his mind in respect to the right of self-defense, the virtue of courage, the sanctity of life, the nature and the limits of the doctrine of non-resistance, would be all thrown together into a jumble of hopeless confusion in his mind, and the only result would be his muttering to himself, after a moment of bewilderment and vexation, “I would shoot him, anyhow.”  Such treatment would not only fail to convince him that his idea was wrong, but would effectually close his heart against any such conviction.

The Gentle Mode of Treatment.

But let the mother first see and recognize those bearings and relations of the question which the boy sees—­that is, those which are the most direct and immediate—­and allow them their full force, and she establishes a sympathy between his mind and hers, and prepares the way for his being led by her to taking into the account other considerations which, though of greater importance, are not so obvious, and which it would be wholly unreasonable to expect that the boy would see himself, since they do not come within the range of observation that could be reached spontaneously by the unaided faculties of such a child.  Suppose the mother says, in reply to her boy’s boastful declaration that he would shoot the robber,

“There would be a certain degree of justice in that, no doubt.”

“Yes,” rejoins the boy, “it would be no more than he deserved.”

“When a man engages in the commission of a crime,” adds the mother, “he runs the risk of all the perils that he exposes himself to, from the efforts of people to defend their property, and perhaps their lives; so that, perhaps, he would have no right to complain if people did shoot at him.”

“Not a bit of right,” says the boy.

“But then there are some other things to be considered,” says the mother, “which, though they do not show that it would be unjust towards him, might make it bad for us to shoot him.”

“What things?” asks the boy.

The mother having candidly admitted whatever there was of truth in the boy’s view of the subject, and thus placed herself, as it were, side by side with him, he is prepared to see and admit what she is going to point out to his observation—­not as something directly antagonistic to what he has said, but as something additional, something which is also to be taken into the account.