treats the same offence now with severity and now with leniency, as the passing humour dictates, is laying up miseries for herself and her children.  She is making herself contemptible in their eyes; she is setting them an example of uncontrolled feelings; she is encouraging them to transgress by the prospect of probable impunity:  she is entailing endless squabbles and accompanying damage to her own temper and the tempers of her little ones; she is reducing their minds to a moral chaos, which after years of bitter experience will with difficulty bring into order.  Better even a barbarous form of domestic government carried out consistently, than a humane one inconsistently carried out.  Again we say, avoid coercive measures whenever it is possible to do so; but when you find despotism really necessary, be despotic in good earnest.

Remember that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others.  Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by and by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye.  This it is which makes the system of discipline by natural consequences so especially appropriate to the social state which we in England have now reached.  In feudal times, when one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his superiors, it was well that during childhood, parental vengeance should be a chief means of government.  But now that the citizen has little to fear from any one—­now that the good or evil which he experiences is mainly that which in the order of things results from his own conduct, he should from his first years begin to learn, experimentally, the good or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct.  Aim, therefore, to diminish the parental government, as fast as you can substitute for it in your child’s mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results.  During infancy a considerable amount of absolutism is necessary.  A three-year old urchin playing with an open razor, cannot be allowed to learn by this discipline of consequences; for the consequences may be too serious.  But as intelligence increases, the number of peremptory interferences may be, and should be, diminished, with the view of gradually ending them as maturity is approached.  All transitions are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world.  Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate; which, by cultivating a boy’s faculty of self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and by so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity.  Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our political rule:  at the outset, autocratic control, where control is really needful; by and by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive extensions of this liberty of the subject; gradually ending in parental abdication.