The light smart slap, with which the mother visits the little child when he is naughty, is often both effective and educative. It changes the current of baby’s thoughts, and he no longer wishes to pull his sister’s hair. But should not the slap be a last resort when no other way is left of changing his thoughts? With the older child a theory of punishments rests less upon the necessity to change the culprit’s thoughts than upon the hope of forming a new association of ideas, that is, of certain pains and penalties inevitably attached to certain forms of wrong-doing. This, we know too well, is a teaching of life, and is not to be overlooked in education. The experience of each of us goes to prove that every breach of law, in thought or deed, is attended by its own penalties, immediate or remote, and the child who is not brought up to know that “due follows deed in course,” is sent out to his first campaign undrilled and untrained, a raw recruit. Our contention is (_a_), that the need for punishment is mostly preventable, and (_b_), that the fear of punishment is hardly ever so strong a motive as the delight of the particular wrong-doing in view. If punishment were necessarily reformative and able to cure us all of those “sins we have a mind to,” why, the world would be a very good world, for no manner of sin escapes its present punishment. The fact is, not that punishment is unnecessary or that it is useless, but that it is inadequate and barely touches our aim; which is, not the visitation of the offence, but the correction of that fault of character of which the offence is the outcome. Jemmy tells lies and we punish him, and by so doing we mark our sense of the offence; but, probably, no punishment could be invented drastic enough to cure Jemmy of telling lies in the future, and this is the thing to be aimed at. No, we must look deeper; we must find out what weak place in character, what false habit of thinking, leads Jemmy to tell lies, and we must deal with this false habit in the only possible way, by forming the contrary habit of true thinking, which will make Jemmy grow up a true man. “I think I have never told a lie since,” said a lady, describing the single conversation in which her father cured her of lying by setting up an altogether new train of thought. Not mere spurts of occasional punishment, but the incessant watchfulness and endeavour which go to the forming and preserving of the habits of the good life, is what we mean by discipline, and from this point of view never were there such disciplinarians as the parents who labour on the lines we indicate. Every habit of courtesy, consideration, order, neatness, punctuality, truthfulness, is itself a schoolmaster, and orders life with the most unfailing diligence.