Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their sense of justice than all our decisions can.  Be sure to get each one to state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital.  Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light.  Usually that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary acknowledgment of wrong.  The boys—­or girls—­have for the first time seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without prejudice.  They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we when convinced against our wishes.

When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still not offer a verdict.  Put the case to the contestants and let them settle it.  Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to insist on exact statements of fact.  That course should be excellent training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man’s side, in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious quarrels of later life.  Teach children to think through their differences.

The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be taken to a physician.  Get him right nervously, physically, first.  He is out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others.  When the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious dispensation of natural depravity.  The probability is that the home life is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find unity of action.  Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful living than to see it constantly before them in their parents.  A harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children.  Such harmony is a matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own attitude.

Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the family that spoils them.  The single child is at a great disadvantage; he occupies the throne alone.  His home life becomes a mere series of spokes radiating from himself.  When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new, self-centric social order.  Whatever the number of children may be, each one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.  Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this.  Do not try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he will have to live some day.

Sec. 2.  FIGHTING