Another great advantage of this natural discipline is, that it is a discipline of pure justice; and will be recognised as such by every child.  Whoso suffers nothing more than the evil which in the order of nature results from his own misbehaviour, is much less likely to think himself wrongly treated than if he suffers an artificially inflicted evil; and this will hold of children as of men.  Take the case of a boy who is habitually reckless of his clothes—­scrambles through hedges without caution, or is utterly regardless of mud.  If he is beaten, or sent to bed, he is apt to consider himself ill-used; and is more likely to brood over his injuries than to repent of his transgressions.  But suppose he is required to rectify as far as possible the harm he has done—­to clean off the mud with which he has covered himself, or to mend the tear as well as he can.  Will he not feel that the evil is one of his own producing?  Will he not while paying this penalty be continuously conscious of the connection between it and its cause?  And will he not, spite his irritation, recognise more or less clearly the justice of the arrangement?  If several lessons of this kind fail to produce amendment—­if suits of clothes are prematurely spoiled—­if the father, pursuing this same system of discipline, declines to spend money for new ones until the ordinary time has elapsed—­and if meanwhile, there occur occasions on which, having no decent clothes to go in, the boy is debarred from joining the rest of the family on holiday excursions and fete days, it is manifest that while he will keenly feel the punishment, he can scarcely fail to trace the chain of causation, and to perceive that his own carelessness is the origin of it.  And seeing this, he will not have any such sense of injustice as if there were no obvious connection between the transgression and its penalty.

Again, the tempers both of parents and children are much less liable to be ruffled under this system than under the ordinary system.  When instead of letting children experience the painful results which naturally follow from wrong conduct, parents themselves inflict certain other painful results, they produce double mischief.  Making, as they do, multiplied family laws; and identifying their own supremacy and dignity with the maintenance of these laws; every transgression is regarded as an offence against themselves, and a cause of anger on their part.  And then come the further vexations which result from taking upon themselves, in the shape of extra labour or cost, those evil consequences which should have been allowed to fall on the wrong-doers.  Similarly with the children.  Penalties which the necessary reaction of things brings round upon them—­penalties which are inflicted by impersonal agency, produce an irritation that is comparatively slight and transient; whereas, penalties voluntarily inflicted by a parent, and afterwards thought of as caused by him or her, produce an irritation