The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be pleasant to its parents on the other.  “You must never,” Rousseau gravely warns us, “inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the child’s nearest friend?  Why are the effects of conduct upon the actor’s own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with the title of being natural?  Surely, while we leave to the young the widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do.  One of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from yielding to a given impulse.  Rousseau was quite right in insisting on practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting, accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without.  The great, and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of social offenders by a government.

Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed authority.  In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no inconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy terms in our earliest days.  If in another sense the will of each individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time for independent action comes, the force of the association will continue.  Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal, while the armour of old experience