the most complete establishment of her authority.  I knew a mother whose children were trained to habits of almost perfect obedience, and whose only method of punishment, so far as I know, was to require the offender to stand on one foot and count five, ten, or twenty, according to the nature and aggravation of the offense.  Such a mother, of course, begins early with her children.  She trains them from their earliest years to this constant subjection of their will to hers.  Such penalties, moreover, owe their efficiency not to the degree of pain or inconvenience that they impose upon the offender, but mainly upon their calling his attention, distinctly, after every offense, to the fact that he has done wrong.  Slight as this is, it will prove to be sufficient if it always comes—­if no case of disobedience or of willful wrong-doing of any kind is allowed to pass unnoticed, or is not followed by the infliction of the proper penalty.  It is in all cases the certainty, and not the severity, of punishment which constitutes its power.

Suppose one is not at the Beginning.

What has been said thus far relates obviously to cases where the mother is at the commencement of her work of training.  This is the way to begin; but you can not begin unless you are at the beginning.  If your children are partly grown, and you find that they are not under your command, the difficulty is much greater.  The principles which should govern the management are the same, but they can not be applied by means so gentle.  The prison, it may be, must now be somewhat more real, the terms of imprisonment somewhat longer, and there may be cases of insubordination so decided as to require the offender to be carried to it by force, on account of his refusal to go of his own accord, and perhaps to be held there, or even to be tied.  Cases requiring treatment so decisive as this must be very rare with children under ten years of age; and when they occur, the mother has reason to feel great self-condemnation—­or at least great self-abasement—­at finding that she has failed so entirely in the first great moral duty of the mother, which is to train her children to complete submission to her authority from the beginning.

Children coming under New Control.

Sometimes, however, it happens that children are transferred from one charge to another, so that the one upon whom the duty of government devolves, perhaps only for a time, finds that the child or children put under his or her charge have been trained by previous mismanagement to habits of utter insubordination.  I say, trained to such habits, for the practice of allowing children to gain their ends by any particular means is really training them to the use of those means.  Thus multitudes of children are taught to disobey, and trained to habits of insubmission and insubordination, by the means most effectually adapted to that end.

Difficulties.