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After the foregoing exposition of principles, our remaining space may best be occupied by a few of the chief maxims and rules deducible from them; and with a view to brevity we will put these in a hortatory form.

Do not expect from a child any great amount of moral goodness.  During early years every civilised man passes through that phase of character exhibited by the barbarous race from which he is descended.  As the child’s features—­flat nose, forward-opening nostrils, large lips, wide-apart eyes, absent frontal sinus, etc.—­resemble for a time those of the savage, so, too, do his instincts.  Hence the tendencies to cruelty, to thieving, to lying, so general among children—­tendencies which, even without the aid of discipline, will become more or less modified just as the features do.  The popular idea that children are “innocent,” while it is true with respect to evil knowledge, is totally false with respect to evil impulses; as half an hour’s observation in the nursery will prove to any one.  Boys when left to themselves, as at public schools, treat each other more brutally than men do; and were they left to themselves at an earlier age their brutality would be still more conspicuous.

Not only is it unwise to set up a high standard of good conduct for children, but it is even unwise to use very urgent incitements to good conduct.  Already most people recognise the detrimental results of intellectual precocity; but there remains to be recognised the fact that moral precocity also has detrimental results.  Our higher moral faculties, like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex.  By consequence, both are comparatively late in their evolution.  And with the one as with the other, an early activity produced by stimulation will be at the expense of the future character.  Hence the not uncommon anomaly that those who during childhood were models of juvenile goodness, by and by undergo a seemingly inexplicable change for the worse, and end by being not above but below par; while relatively exemplary men are often the issue of a childhood by no means promising.

Be content, therefore, with moderate measures and moderate results.  Bear in mind that a higher morality, like a higher intelligence, must be reached by slow growth; and you will then have patience with those imperfections which your child hourly displays.  You will be less prone to that constant scolding, and threatening, and forbidding, by which many parents induce a chronic domestic irritation, in the foolish hope that they will thus make their children what they should be.

This liberal form of domestic government, which does not seek despotically to regulate all the details of a child’s conduct, necessarily results from the system we advocate.  Satisfy yourself with seeing that your child always suffers the natural consequences of his actions, and you will avoid that excess of control in which so many parents err.  Leave him wherever you can to the discipline of experience, and you will save him from that hot-house virtue which over-regulation produces in yielding natures, or that demoralising antagonism which it produces in independent ones.