In all countries there are many, among even the most refined and highly cultivated classes, who are not at all embarrassed by any moral delicacy of this kind.  This is especially the case in those countries in Europe, particularly on the Continent, where the idea above referred to, of the allowableness of falsehood in certain cases as a means for the attainment of a good end, is generally entertained.  The French have two terrible bugbears, under the names of Monsieur and Madame Croquemitaine, who are as familiar to the imaginations of French children as Santa Claus is, in a much more agreeable way, to the juvenile fancy at our firesides.  Monsieur and Madame Croquemitaine are frightful monsters, who come down the chimney, or through the roof, at night, and carry off bad children.  They learn from their little fingers—­which whisper in their ears when they hold them near—­who the bad children are, where they live, and what they have done.  The instinctive faith of young children in their mother’s truthfulness is so strong that no absurdity seems gross enough to overcome it.

The Black Man and the Policeman.

There are many mothers among us who—­though not quite prepared to call in the aid of ghosts, giants, and hobgoblins, or of Monsieur and Madame Croquemitaine, in managing their children—­still, sometimes, try to eke out their failing authority by threatening them with the “black man,” or the “policeman,” or some other less, supernatural terror.  They seem to imagine that inasmuch as, while there is no such thing in existence as a hobgoblin, there really are policemen and prisons, they only half tell an untruth by saying to the recalcitrant little one that a policeman is coming to carry him off to jail.

Injurious Effects.

Although, by these various modes of exciting imaginary fears, there is no direct and outward infliction of bodily suffering, the effect produced on the delicate organization of the brain by such excitements is violent in the extreme.  The paroxysms of agitation and terror which they sometimes excite, and which are often spontaneously renewed by darkness and solitude, and by other exciting causes, are of the nature of temporary insanity.  Indeed, the extreme nervous excitability which they produce sometimes becomes a real insanity, which, though it may, in many cases, be finally outgrown, may probably in many others lead to lasting and most deplorable results.

Harsh Reproofs and Threatenings.

3.  There is a third mode of treatment, more common, perhaps, among us than either of the preceding, which, though much milder in its character than they, we still class among the violent measures, on account of its operation and effects.  It consists of stern and harsh rebukes, denunciations of the heinousness of the sin of falsehood, with solemn premonitions of the awful consequences of it, in this life and in that to come, intended to awaken feelings of alarm