These few familiar instances, here chosen because of the simplicity with which they illustrate our point, will make clear to every one the distinction between those natural penalties which we contend are the truly efficient ones, and those artificial penalties commonly substituted for them.  Before going on to exhibit the higher and subtler applications of the principle exemplified, let us note its many and great superiorities over the principle, or rather the empirical practice, which prevails in most families.

One superiority is that the pursuance of it generates right conceptions of cause and effect; which by frequent and consistent experience are eventually rendered definite and complete.  Proper conduct in life is much better guaranteed when the good and evil consequences of actions are understood, than when they are merely believed on authority.  A child who finds that disorderliness entails the trouble of putting things in order, or who misses a gratification from dilatoriness, or whose carelessness is followed by the want of some much-prized possession, not only suffers a keenly-felt consequence, but gains a knowledge of causation:  both the one and the other being just like those which adult life will bring.  Whereas a child who in such cases receives a reprimand, or some factitious penalty, not only experiences a consequence for which it often cares very little, but misses that instruction respecting the essential natures of good and evil conduct, which it would else have gathered.  It is a vice of the common system of artificial rewards and punishments, long since noticed by the clear-sighted, that by substituting for the natural results of misbehaviour certain tasks or castigations, it produces a radically wrong moral standard.  Having throughout infancy and boyhood always regarded parental or tutorial displeasure as the chief result of a forbidden action, the youth has gained an established association of ideas between such action and such displeasure, as cause and effect.  Hence when parents and tutors have abdicated, and their displeasure is not to be feared, the restraints on forbidden actions are in great measure removed:  the true restraints, the natural reactions, having yet to be learnt by sad experience.  As writes one who has had personal knowledge of this short-sighted system:—­“Young men let loose from school, particularly those whose parents have neglected to exert their influence, plunge into every description of extravagance; they know no rule of action—­they are ignorant of the reasons for moral conduct—­they have no foundation to rest upon—­and until they have been severely disciplined by the world are extremely dangerous members of society.”