It appears to me to be incontestable that in this spontaneous outgoing of fellow-feeling towards other creatures, human and animal, the child manifests something of a truly moral quality. C.’s stout and persistent championship of the London horses against the oppression of the bearing-rein had in it something of righteous indignation. The way in which his mind was at this period pre-occupied with animal suffering suggests that his sympathies with animals were rousing the first fierce protest against the wicked injustice of the world. The boy De Quincey got this first sense of the existence of moral evil in another way through his sympathy with a sister who, rumour said, had been brutally treated by a servant. He could not, he tells us, bear to look on the woman. It was not anger. ‘The feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering horror as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife.’[177] ----- Footnote 177: _Autobiographical Sketches_, chap. i. ----- _Children’s Lies._ We may now turn to the other main charge against children, that of lying. According to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the manner born and equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even writers on childhood, by no means prejudiced against them, lean to the view that untruth is universal among children, and to some extent at least innate.[178] ----- Footnote 178: See the quotations from Montaigne and Perez, given by Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 309 f. ----- Here, surely, there is need of discrimination. A lie connotes, or should connote, an assertion made with full consciousness of its untruth, and in order to mislead. It may well be doubted whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious. It is satisfactory to note a tendency to take a milder and more reasonable view of this infantile fibbing; and in what follows I can but follow up the excellent recent studies of Dr. Stanley Hall, and M. Compayré.[179] ----- Footnote 179: Stanley Hall, “Children’s Lies,” _Amer. Journal of Psychology_, 1890; Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 309 ff. -----