“Then how can you expect your child to learn those petty arts of deception without which she must fall an easy prey to any one who wishes to deceive her?  How can she detect lying in other people unless she has had some experience of it in her own practice?  How, again, can she learn when it will be well for her to lie, and when to refrain from doing so, unless she has made many a mistake on a small scale while at an age when mistakes do not greatly matter?  The Sunchild (and here he reverently raised his hat), as you may read in chapter thirty-one of his Sayings, has left us a touching tale of a little boy, who, having cut down an apple tree in his father’s garden, lamented his inability to tell a lie.  Some commentators, indeed, have held that the evidence was so strongly against the boy that no lie would have been of any use to him, and that his perception of this fact was all that he intended to convey; but the best authorities take his simple words, ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ in their most natural sense, as being his expression of regret at the way in which his education had been neglected.  If that case had come before me, I should have punished the boy’s father, unless he could show that the best authorities are mistaken (as indeed they too generally are), and that under more favourable circumstances the boy would have been able to lie, and would have lied accordingly.

“There is no occasion for you to send your child to a deformatory.  I am always averse to extreme measures when I can avoid them.  Moreover, in a deformatory she would be almost certain to fall in with characters as intractable as her own.  Take her home and whip her next time she so much as pulls about the salt.  If you will do this whenever you get a chance, I have every hope that you will have no occasion to come to me again.”

“Very well, sir,” said the father, “I will do my best, but the child is so instinctively truthful that I am afraid whipping will be of little use.”

There were other cases, none of them serious, which in the old days would have been treated by a straightener.  My father had already surmised that the straightener had become extinct as a class, having been superseded by the Managers and Cashiers of the Musical Banks, but this became more apparent as he listened to the cases that next came on.  These were dealt with quite reasonably, except that the magistrate always ordered an emetic and a strong purge in addition to the rest of his sentence, as holding that all diseases of the moral sense spring from impurities within the body, which must be cleansed before there could be any hope of spiritual improvement.  If any devils were found in what passed from the prisoner’s body, he was to be brought up again; for in this case the rest of the sentence might very possibly be remitted.