Do not regret the display of considerable self-will on the part of your children.  It is the correlative of that diminished coerciveness so conspicuous in modern education.  The greater tendency to assert freedom of action on the one side, corresponds to the smaller tendency to tyrannise on the other.  They both indicate an approach to the system of discipline we contend for, under which children will be more and more led to rule themselves by the experience of natural consequences; and they are both accompaniments of our more advanced social state.  The independent English boy is the father of the independent English man; and you cannot have the last without the first.  German teachers say that they had rather manage a dozen German boys than one English one.  Shall we, therefore, wish that our boys had the manageableness of German ones, and with it the submissiveness and political serfdom of adult Germans?  Or shall we not rather tolerate in our boys those feelings which make them free men, and modify our methods accordingly?

Lastly, always recollect that to educate rightly is not a simple and easy thing, but a complex and extremely difficult thing, the hardest task which devolves on adult life.  The rough-and-ready style of domestic government is indeed practicable by the meanest and most uncultivated intellects.  Slaps and sharp words are penalties that suggest themselves alike to the least reclaimed barbarian and the stolidest peasant.  Even brutes can use this method of discipline; as you may see in the growl and half-bite with which a bitch will check a too-exigeant puppy.  But if you would carry out with success a rational and civilised system, you must be prepared for considerable mental exertion—­for some study, some ingenuity, some patience, some self-control.  You will have habitually to consider what are the results which in adult life follow certain kinds of acts; and you must then devise methods by which parallel results shall be entailed on the parallel acts of your children.  It will daily be needful to analyse the motives of juvenile conduct—­to distinguish between acts that are really good and those which, though simulating them, proceed from inferior impulses; while you will have to be ever on your guard against the cruel mistake not unfrequently made, of translating neutral acts into transgressions, or ascribing worse feelings than were entertained.  You must more or less modify your method to suit the disposition of each child; and must be prepared to make further modifications as each child’s disposition enters on a new phase.  Your faith will often be taxed to maintain the requisite perseverance in a course which seems to produce little or no effect.  Especially if you are dealing with children who have been wrongly treated, you must be prepared for a lengthened trial of patience before succeeding with better methods; since that which is not easy even where a right state of feeling has been established from the beginning, becomes doubly difficult