“Of the right kind, yes,” said Father Payne.  “Some people want a good deal more than they get, and some a certain amount less than they get.  It’s a delicate business.  It is not always fortifying.  Take a simple case.  A bold, brazen sort of boy who is untruthful may want a whipping; but a timid and imaginative boy who is untruthful doesn’t necessarily want a whipping at all—­it makes him more, and not less, timid.  One of the most ridiculous and persistent blunders in human life is to believe that a certain penalty is divinely appointed for a certain offence.  Our theory of punishment is all wrong; we inflict punishment, as a rule, not to improve an offender, but out of revenge, or because it gives us a comfortable sense of our own justice.  And the whole difficulty of discipline is that it is apt to be applied in lumps, and distributed wholesale to people who don’t all want the same amount.  We haven’t really got very far away from the Squeers theory of giving all the boys brimstone and treacle alike.”

“Yes, but in a school,” said Vincent, “would not the boys themselves resent it, if they were punished differently for the same offence?”

“That is to say,” said Father Payne, “that you are to treat boys, whom you are supposed to be training, in accordance with their ideas of justice, and not in accordance with yours!  Why should you confirm them in a wholly erroneous view of justice?  Justice isn’t a mathematical thing—­or rather, it ought to be a mathematical thing, because you ought to take into account a lot of factors, which you simply omit from your calculation.  I believe very little in punishment, to tell you the truth; it ought only to be inflicted after many warnings, when the offence is deliberately repeated.  I don’t believe that the sane and normal person is a habitual and deliberate offender.  The kind of absence of self-restraint which makes people unable to resist temptation, in any form, is a disease, and ought to be segregated.  I haven’t the slightest doubt that we shall end by segregating or sterilising the person of criminal tendencies, which only means a total inability, in the presence of a temptation, to foresee consequences, and which gratifies a momentary desire.”

“But apart from definite moral disease,” said Vincent, “isn’t it a good thing to compel people, if possible, into a certain sort of habit?  I am speaking of faults which are not criminal—­things like unpunctuality, laziness, small excesses, mild untrustworthiness, and so forth.”

“Well, I don’t personally believe in coercive discipline at all,” said Father Payne.  “I think it simply gets people out of shape.  I believe in trying to give people a real motive for self-discipline:  take unpunctuality, for instance.  The only way to make an unpunctual person punctual is to convince him that it is rude and unjust to keep other people waiting.  There is nothing sacred about punctuality in itself, unless some one else