We are living in an epoch of extremists. This morning the suffering dyspeptic is told that he will find a complete cure in a two weeks’ fast; this afternoon he is advised that by eating every two hours he will be forever free from his ills. On the one hand is a sect preaching that prayer will bring us peace, power and plenty, and on the other is a schism pleading that supplication, in itself, availeth nothing. Here we have a group of modern disciplinists teaching that corporal punishment is a fading relic of barbaric brutality; there we find a sturdy school of old-timers telling us that if we spare the rod we shall spoil the child. With these extremists who specialise in the stomach or in the soul I have no quarrel; but coming down to the subject of disciplining the boy I do want to point out to fathers and mothers seriously and earnestly that there is a happy medium, a middle course--a neutral and natural way. The moral suasion idea is a fine thing in theory and it would be a moderately fine thing actually if parents were all moral suasionists, and if parents and children had nothing else in the world to do but practise it. By this I mean that if all or most parents were naturally equipped to rule by moral suasion, and, secondly, if twenty-four hours of the day could be devoted exclusively to discipline, it would be undoubtedly a commendable method of child-government. Unfortunately, such is not the case, and in dealing with the question collectively we have to take conditions, parents and children as we find them. Nearly every parent possesses the faculty of governing to some extent--greater or less; and all children are capable of responding to it--but in varying degrees. There is, therefore, no hard and fast rule that can be laid down for the guidance of all parents, to be applied successfully to all children. However, by reducing the subject of this article first to boys, and second to the average boy, I think we can get the discussion down to a practicable basis. The little girl is here absolutely eliminated from consideration. I have studied her assiduously and at close range for a number of years and have succeeded in establishing this much only; first, that she is almost too sweetly complex for paternal comprehension, and second, that she is not amenable to the rules by which we discipline the boy. My boy, then, is the average boy, old enough to walk and talk and understand what is said to him, moderately sensitive, moderately affectionate, moderately impulsive, moderately perverse, of ordinarily good health, and possessed of the usual amount of animal spirits.