1. _In regard to punishments._ Neither the magistrate, the parent, nor the master, should bear the sword in vain. Disobedience, which, in all wise governments, is wickedness, must be restrained, and in extreme cases by severe punishments. It would be great weakness to forbear. But one law, however, should govern in the infliction of punishments. They should be inflicted for the purpose of correction, or as “a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to them that do well,” and not to gratify passion or resentment. Punishments inflicted from motives of resentment merely, and often repeated, tend directly to cow the spirit, stultify the intellect, destroy self-respect, and greatly weaken the power of arbitrary volition. Such a man approximates the nature of a brute, and is, in fact, scarcely of the value of a common horse. He is a human being, but in circumstances in which he has few motives of action above those which influence a brute--namely, the indulgence of his animal nature, restrained only by the fear of present punishment. He is not as serviceable as a brute, and is far more dangerous than a brute. A slave to whose sense of what is right and proper to be done nothing can be trusted, and from whom nothing can be gotten but that which is extorted from his fears, is of no value unless it be to a master of the same genus--that is, like himself, a brute. The prodigality as well as wickedness of this course requires no comment. There is a more excellent way of maintaining authority, and it lies upon the conscience of every master no less than upon his purse to observe it as a duty: it is _to punish for the purpose of correction only--not to destroy, but to save_.