There is no possible method of _compelling_ a child to feel sympathy or affection; the only possible method is to observe the conditions under which these feelings arise spontaneously, and then endeavour to produce the conditions. Sympathy, undoubtedly, is partly instinctive. Children are worried when their brothers or sisters cry, and often cry too. They will take their part vehemently against the grown-ups when disagreeable things are being done to them. When my boy had a wound on his elbow which had to be dressed, his sister (aged eighteen months) could hear him crying in another room, and was very much upset. She kept on repeating “Jonny crying, Jonny crying”, until the painful business was finished. When my boy saw his mother extracting a thorn with a needle from her foot, he said anxiously, “It doesn’t hurt, Mummy”. She said it did, wishing to give him a lesson in not making a fuss. He insisted that it didn’t hurt, whereupon she insisted that it did. He then burst into sobs, just as vehement as if it had been his own foot. Such occurrences must spring from instinctive physical sympathy. This is the basis upon which more elaborate forms of sympathy must be built. It is clear that nothing further is needed in the way of positive education except to bring home to the child the fact that people and animals can feel pain, and do feel it under certain circumstances. There is, however, a further negative condition: the child must not see people he respects committing unkind or cruel actions. If the father shoots or the mother speaks rudely to the maids, the child will catch these vices. It is a difficult question how and when to make a child aware of the evil in the world. It is impossible to grow up ignorant of wars and massacres and poverty and preventable disease which is not prevented. At some stage, the child must know of these things, and must combine the knowledge with a firm conviction that it is a dreadful thing to inflict, or even permit, any suffering which can be avoided. We are here confronted by a problem similar to that which faces people who wish to preserve female chastity; these people formerly believed in ignorance till marriage, but now adopt more positive methods.