While there are these isolated attacks on various points of the daily discipline, we see now and again a bolder line of action in the shape of a general protest against its severity. Children have been known to urge that the punishments inflicted on them are ineffectual; and, although their opinion on such matters is hardly disinterested, it is sometimes pertinent enough. An American boy aged five years ten months began to cry because he was forbidden to go into the yard to play, and was threatened by his mother with a whipping. Whereupon he observed: “Well now, mamma, that will only make me cry more”. These childish protests are, as we know, wont to be met by the commonplaces about the affection which prompts the correction. But the child finds it hard to swallow these subtleties. For him love is love, that is caressing, and doing everything for his present enjoyment; and here is the mother who says she loves him, and often acts as if she did, transforming herself into an ogre to torment him and make him miserable. He may accept her assurance that she scolds and chastises him because she is a good mother; only he is apt to wish that she were a shade less good. A boy of four had one morning to remain in bed till ten o’clock as a punishment for misbehaviour. He proceeded to address his mother in this wise: "If I had any little children I’d be a worse mother than you—I’d be quite a bad mother; I’d let the children get up directly I had done my breakfast at any rate". If, on the other hand, the mother puts forward her own comfort as the ground of the restraint she may be met by this kind of thing: “I wish you’d be a little more self-sacrificing and let me make a noise”. Enough has been said to illustrate the ways in which the natural child kicks against the imposition of restraints on his free activity. He begins by showing himself an open foe to authority. For a long time after, while making a certain show of submission, he harbours in his breast something of the rebel’s spirit. He does his best to evade the most galling parts of the daily discipline, and displays an admirable ingenuity in devising excuses for apparent acts of insubordination. Where candour is permitted he is apt to prove himself an exceedingly acute critic of the system which is imposed on him. All this, moreover, seems to show that a child objects not only to the particular administration under which he happens to live, but to all law as implying restraints on free activity. Thus, from the child’s point of view, so far as we have yet examined it, punishment as such is a thing which ought not to be.