and by a judicious knowledge of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging
and being flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. Insulting defiance,
deliberative disobedience, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are diseases of
the will, and, in very rare cases of Promethean obstinacy, the severe process of
breaking the will is needful, just as in surgery it is occasionally needful to
rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed, to set it over better. It is a cruel
process, but a crampy will in childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in
the adult. Few parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just when it
is needed. It is, as some one has said, like knocking a man down to save him
from stepping off a precipice. Even the worst punishments are but very faint
types of what nature has in store in later life for some forms of perversity of will,
and are better than sarcasm, ridicule, or tasks, as penalties. The strength of
obstinacy is admirable, and every one ought to have his own will; but a false
direction, though almost always the result of faulty previous training when the
soul more fluid and mobile, is all the more fatal. While so few intelligent parents
are able to refrain from the self-indulgence of too much rewarding or giving,
even though it injures the child, it is perhaps too much to expect the hardihood
which can be justly cold to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all
its stock of goodness and arts of endearment, to buy back good-will after
punishment has been deserved. If we wait too long, and punish in cold blood, a
young child may hate us; while, if we punish on the instant, and with passion, a
little of which is always salutary, on the principle, ohne Affekt kein Effekt,
[Without passion, no effect] an older child may fail of the natural reactions of
conscience, which should always be secured. The maxim, summum jus summa
injuria, [The rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong] we are often told, is
peculiarly true in school, and so it is; but to forego all punishment is no less
injustice to the average child, for it is to abandon one of the most effective
means of will-culture. We never punish but a part, as it were, of the child's
nature; he has lied, but is not therefore a liar, and we deal only with the specific
act, and must love all the rest of him.
And yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, and the average teacher is so
inadequate to that hardest and most tactful of all his varied duties, viz., selecting
the right outcrop of the right fault of the right child at the right time and place,
mood, etc., for best effect, that the bold statement of such principles as above is
perhaps not entirely without practical danger, especially in two cases which
Madame Necker and Sigismund have pointed out, and in several cases of which
the present writer has notes. First, an habitually good child sometimes has a
saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a series of insubordinate acts are