“What a pleasure to find that we are one in our ideas as in our feelings, and for one never to have a plan that the other has not already thought of. For the last twenty-four hours I have been trying the method that you suggest with our little one. I had re-read Julie’s plan, and I had decided that we were too far away from it. Controlled by circumstances, we have either thought too much or not enough of our child. Busy in a kind of work which demands quiet, we have kept her at her tasks and her lessons, without taking time to cultivate a taste in her for them, or of choosing the times when she was the most disposed for them. When she has rebelled, and we have wanted her to be quiet, we have been willing to do anything to silence her, so that we could go on with our work. “‘That which makes children cry,’ Julie says, ‘is the attention that is paid to them. It is only necessary to let them cry all day, a few times, without paying any attention to them, to cure them of the habit. If one pets them or threatens them, it has no effect. The more attention that you give to their tears, the more reason they have for continuing them. They will break themselves of the habit very soon when they see that no one takes notice; for, great and small, no one cares to give himself useless trouble.’ There, my good friend, is where we have been wrong. Julie’s children were happy and peaceable under her eyes, but they were subject to no one and only obliged to allow others the same liberty they enjoyed themselves. “We want to be left in peace; that is just, but sometimes we constrain our child, and she takes her revenge as she can. Moreover, there is no use denying it, our little one has a strong will, and she has no sensibility and no taste. It must be that this is, in part, our fault, and because we have not known how to direct her. More than that, we risk making a still greater mistake in conquering her by force or by fear, though we have believed that it could be done in no other way. In acting thus, we are going to be unhappy, and our child is going to develop a hard and an unendurable obstinacy. “I have resolved: first, never to get angry, and always to be calm and cold as justice itself when it comes to a question of correction. “Second, never to use either whip or blow, movement or tone, which show impatience. Blows of whatever kind seem to me odious. They harden, debase, and prevent the birth of sentiment. On this score we have been guilty. When, as an infant, Eudora put her hands on something that she ought not to have touched, and did not take them off at the first word, it seemed to us that a little blow on her rebellious hand might have good effect. But that little blow has led to the whip; the child has become a torment, and we are annoyed by it; that little blow was a great mistake; it is time that we began over again, and we have not a moment to lose.