"What about it?" I continued, "what about the whole damned lot of registers and log books and Form 9 b's? I didn't care a rap who saw the inside of my desk or my log book. As a matter of fact no one saw what was in the log; never a child opened it. Why? Because there was no prohibition. You lock up all the blamed things and put the fear of God on any kid that dares touch your desk ... result! they look on all your belongings as forbidden fruit, and if they can handle your log book when you are safely out of the way you bet your boots that they'll do it. Can't you see that children are really decent kindly creatures with their own philosophy, that is, their own idea of the importance of things? What is important to them is a toy or a dogfight or a quarrel or a love affair. They don't want to touch stodgy official books. But when you say to them: 'This desk is holy ground' why, every self-respecting kid has but one ambition in life ... to poke his nose into your desk and hide your registers." "Well," he said with a grim smile, "what about those tools in the woodwork room? If children are the saints you make them out to be, how did your boys come to spoil good tools?" "I admit that I made a mistake," I said cheerfully. "I set out on the assumption that a boy can be trusted with tools. I dropped the belief. Wood was scarce and often I couldn't get enough to keep the boys working. Result!... they took to hammering nails into benches and walls. I see now that much of a boy is destructiveness. I might have known it, for as a boy I tore the inside out of everything to see how it worked. If I had a small class I could have kept them interested in making an article. Yet I remember seeing Tom Watson, the best worker in the school, make a good rabbit-trough; then when he had finished he deliberately chipped a chunk off a plane with a hammer." "What did you do?" "I simply chucked him out of woodwork; told him he wasn't beyond the infant-room stage, and gave him lessons with a class two grades below his own." "Did you chuck him out forcibly?" "I suppose I did." "Ah!" Macdonald looked triumphant. "In other words you forgot your principles and punished?"