This thought of discipline, for example, is one of the large comprehensive ideas which must inform and direct the life, rather than be gathered up into a rule, easy to remember and easy to apply, when, now and then, comes the occasion for it. If Tommy is naughty, whip him and send him to bed--is a ready-reckoner kind of rule, handy to have about one, and is the sort of thing which many people mean by discipline. Now we would not say that punishment is never to be used, very much otherwise. Neither would we say that physic is never to be taken. But punishment, like physic, is a casualty only of occasional occurrence at the worst, and punishment and physic alike are reduced to a minimum in proportion as we secure healthy conditions of body and mind. We are not anxious to lay down canons for punishment. Mr. Herbert Spencer has not perhaps said the last word, but he has given us a quite convenient rule to go on with. A child should be punished by the natural consequences of his offence. To carry this suggestion out _au pied de la lettre_ would often enough mean lasting, even fatal injury to the child, bodily and mental. You cannot let the indolent child be punished by ignorance, or the wilful and adventurous child break his limb; but, so far as punishments have been allowed to become necessary, the nature of the offence gives one a clue to a suitable punishment. The child who does not eat his porridge goes without his plum. This is, anyway, a punishment in kind, perhaps the nearest approach to natural consequences which it is advisable to try. But parents should face the fact that children rather enjoy punishments. In these they find the opportunities, so frequent is story-books, so rare in real life, for showing a fine pluck. The child who is in punishment is very commonly enjoying himself immensely, because he is respecting himself intensely. There is a bit of heroism in the bearing of the penalty which is very apt to do away with any sense of contrition for the offence, and the plucky little fellow, who takes his punishment with an air, is by no means a bad and hardened young offender, but is an economist of opportunities, making the best of what comes to hand for his own real education. His mother’s distress, his father’s disapproval, these are quite different matters, and carry no compensating sense of hardihood. Reflections like these lead one to spare the rod, not at all out of over sensibility to the child’s physical suffering, for we would have him endure hardness if we mean to make a man of him, but purely because it is not easy to find a punishment that does not defeat its own end.