The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1904-06-21
THE PROGRESSIVE FARMER

multiply when there lis no certain administration
of justice, SO in a family, an immense increase of
transgressions results from a hesitating or ir-
regular ~lnt1iction of penalties. A weak mother,
who perpetually threatens and rarely performs
who makes rules in haste and repents of them at
leisure-who treats the same offense now with
severity and now with leniency, according as the
passing humor dictates, is laying up miseries both
for herself and her children. She is making her.
self contemplate 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 e~ntailing endless SQUAD
bles 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 do
nestle government carried out consistently than
a humane one inconsistency carried out. Again
we say, avoid coercive measures whenever it is pos
sible to do SO; but when you find depotism really
necessary, be despotic in good earnest.
Bear constantly in mind the truth 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 child
hood; 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 So
cial state which we in England have now reached.
Under early tyrannical forms of society, 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 pre-
dominant means of government. But now that
the citizen has lttleto fear from any .one-now
that the good Or evil which he experiences
throughout life is mainly that which in the nature
of things results from his own conduct, it is de-
sirable that from his first years he should begin
to learn, experimentally, the good or evil conse-
quences which naturally follow this or that con-
duct. Aim, therefore, to diminish the amount of
parental government as fast as you can substitute
for it in your child's mind that self-government
arising from a foresight of results. In infancy
a considerable amount of absolutism is necessary.
A 3-year-old urchin playing with an open razor
cannot be allowed to learn by this discipline of
consequences; for the consequences may, in such
a case, be too serious. But as intelligence in
creases, the number of instances calling for per-
emptory interference may be, and should be, di-
minished, with the view of gradually ending them
as maturity is approached. All periods of tran
sition are dangerous; and the most dangerous is
the transition from the restraint of the family cir
Gle to a non-restraint of the world. Hence the i'm
portance of pursuing the policy we advocate,
which, alike by cultivating a child's faculty of
self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree
in which it is felt to it's self-constraint, and by
so bringing it, step by step, to a state of unaided
self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and
hazardous change from acknowledgement youth
TO acknowledgements matrritvA Let the history