Another Method.

Charlie’s mother, on the other hand, acts on a different principle.  Charlie comes in sometimes, we will suppose, in a quiet and proper manner.  His mother takes no notice of this.  She considers it a matter of course.  By-and-by, however, under the influence of some special eagerness, he makes a great noise.  Then his mother interposes.  She breaks out upon him with,

“Charlie, what a noise you make!  Don’t you know better than to slam the doer in that way when you come in?  If you can’t learn to make less noise in going in and out, I shall not let you go in and out at all.”

Charlie knows very well that this is an empty threat.  Still, the utterance of it, and the scolding that accompanies it, irritate him a little, and the only possible good effect that can be expected to result from it is to make him try, the next time he comes in, to see how small an abatement of the noise he usually makes will do, as a kind of make-believe obedience to his mother’s command.  He might, indeed, honestly answer his mother’s angry question by saying that he does not know better than to make such a noise.  He does not know why the noise of the door should be disagreeable to his mother.  It is not disagreeable to him.  On the contrary, it is agreeable.  Children always like noise, especially if they make it themselves.  And although Charlie has often been told that he must not make any noise, the reason for this—­namely, that though noise is a source of pleasure, generally, to children, especially when they make it themselves, it is almost always a source of annoyance and pain to grown persons—­has never really entered his mind so as to be actually comprehended us a practical reality.  His ideas in respect to the philosophy of the transaction are, of course, exceedingly vague; but so far as he forms any idea, it is that his mother’s words are the expression of some mysterious but unreasonable sensitiveness on her part, which awakens in her a spirit of fault-finding and ill-humor that vents itself upon him in blaming him for nothing at all; or, as he would express it more tersely, if not so elegantly, that she is “very cross.”  In other words, the impression made by the transaction upon his moral sense is that of wrong-doing on his mother’s part, and not at all on his own.

It is evident, when we thus look into the secret workings of this method of curing children of their faults, that even when it is successful in restraining certain kinds of outward misconduct, and is thus the means of effecting some small amount of good, the injury which it does by its reaction on the spirit of the child may be vastly greater, through the irritation and ill-humor which it occasions, and the impairing of his confidence in the justice and goodness of his mother.  Before leaving this illustration, it must be carefully observed that in the first-mentioned case—­namely, that of Georgie—­the work of curing the fault in question is not to be