Of course, in those occasional hazards where there is a risk of broken limbs or other serious injury, forcible prevention is called for.  But leaving out extreme cases, the system pursued should be, not that of guarding a child from the small risks which it daily runs, but that of advising and warning it against them.  And by pursuing this course, a much stronger filial affection will be generated than commonly exists.  If here, as elsewhere, the discipline of the natural reactions is allowed to come into play—­if in those out-door scramblings and in-door experiments, by which children are liable to injure themselves, they are allowed to persist, subject only to dissuasion more or less earnest according to the danger, there cannot fail to arise an ever-increasing faith in the parental friendship and guidance.  Not only, as before shown, does the adoption of this course enable fathers and mothers to avoid the odium which attaches to the infliction of positive punishment; but, as we here see, it enables them to avoid the odium which attaches to constant thwartings; and even to turn those incidents that commonly cause squabbles, into a means of strengthening the mutual good feeling.  Instead of being told in words, which deeds seem to contradict, that their parents are their best friends, children will learn this truth by a consistent daily experience; and so learning it, will acquire a degree of trust and attachment which nothing else can give.

And now, having indicated the more sympathetic relation which must result from the habitual use of this method, let us return to the question above put—­How is this method to be applied to the graver offences?

Note, in the first place, that these graver offences are likely to be both less frequent and less grave under the regime we have described than under the ordinary regime.  The ill-behaviour of many children is itself a consequence of that chronic irritation in which they are kept by bad management.  The state of isolation and antagonism produced by frequent punishment, necessarily deadens the sympathies; necessarily, therefore, opens the way to those transgressions which the sympathies check.  That harsh treatment which children of the same family inflict on each other, is often, in great measure, a reflex of the harsh treatment they receive from adults—­partly suggested by direct example, and partly generated by the ill-temper and the tendency to vicarious retaliation, which follow chastisements and scoldings.  It cannot be questioned that the greater activity of the affections and happier state of feeling, maintained in children by the discipline we have described, must prevent them from sinning against each other so gravely and so frequently.  The still more reprehensible offences, as lies and petty thefts, will, by the same causes, be diminished.  Domestic estrangement is a fruitful source of such transgressions.  It is a law of human nature, visible enough to all who observe, that those who are debarred the higher gratifications fall back upon the lower; those who have no sympathetic pleasures seek selfish ones; and hence, conversely, the maintenance of happier relations between parents and children is calculated to diminish the number of those offences of which selfishness is the origin.