It is obviously essential to this method that it should be begun early, and applied to minor forms of unkindness. It is only very small injuries to others that you can retort in kind upon the child. And when you can adopt this plan, do not let it seem that you are doing it as a punishment, but rather as an instruction: “See, that is what you did to your little sister.” When the child protests, you say: “Well, if it was unpleasant, you mustn’t do it to her.” So long as the whole incident is simple and immediate, the child will understand, and will learn that other people’s feelings must be considered. In that case, serious cruelty will never develop. All moral instruction must be immediate and concrete: it must arise out of a situation which has grown up naturally, and must not go beyond what ought to be done in this particular instance. The child himself will apply the moral in other similar cases. It is much easier to grasp a concrete instance, and apply analogous considerations to an analogous instance, than to apprehend a general rule and proceed deductively. Do not say, in a general way, “Be brave, be kind”, but urge him to some particular piece of daring, and then say, “Bravo, you were a brave boy”; get him to let his sister play with his mechanical engine, and when he sees her beaming with delight, say, “That’s right, you were a kind boy.” The same principle applies in dealing with cruelty: Look out for its faint beginnings, and prevent them from developing. If, in spite of all your efforts, grave cruelty develops at a later age, the matter must be taken very seriously, and dealt with like an illness. The boy should be punished in the sense that unpleasant things should happen to him, just as they do when he has measles, but not in the sense that he should be made to feel wicked. He should be isolated for a while from other children and from animals, and it should be explained to him that it is not safe to let him associate with them. He should be made to realize, as far as possible, how he would suffer if he were cruelly treated. He should be made to feel that a great misfortune had befallen him in the shape of an impulse to cruelty, and that his elders were endeavouring to shield him from a similar misfortune in the future. I believe that such methods would be completely successful in all except a few pathological cases.