So strong and deep-reaching is this antagonism to law and its restraints apt to be that the childish longing to be ‘big’ is, I believe, grounded on the expectation of liberty. To be big seems to the child more than anything else to be rid of all this imposition of commands, to be able to do what one likes without interference from others. This longing may grow intense in the breast of a quite small child. “Do you know,” asked a little fellow of four years, “what I shall do when I’m a big man? I’ll go to a shop and buy a bun and pick out all the currants.” This funny story is characteristic of the movements of young desire. The small prohibition not to pick out the currants is one that may chafe to soreness a child’s sensibility. _On the Side of Law._ If, however, we look closer we shall find that this hostility is not the whole, perhaps not the most fundamental part of the child’s attitude. It is evident, to begin with, that a good deal of this early criticism of parental government, so far from implying rejection of all rule, plainly implies its acceptance. Some of the earliest and bitterest protests against interference are directed against what looks to the child irregular or opposed to law. He is allowed, for example, for some time to use a pair of scissors as a plaything, and is then suddenly deprived of it, his mother having now first discovered the unsuitability of the plaything. In such a case the passionate outburst and the long bitter protest attest the sense of injustice, the violation of custom and unwritten law. Again, the keen resentful opposition of the child to the look of anything like unfairness and partiality in parental government shows that he has a jealous feeling of regard for the universality and the inviolableness of law. Much, too, of the criticism dealt with above, reveals a fundamental acknowledgment of law—at least for the purposes of the argument. Thus the very attempt to establish an excuse, a justification, may be said to be a tacit admission that if the action _had been_ done as alleged it would have been naughty and deserving of punishment. In truth the small person’s challengings of the _modus operandi_ of his mother’s rule, just because they are often in a true sense _ethical_, clearly start from the assumption of rules, and of the distinction of right and wrong. This of itself shows that there are in the child compliant as well as non-compliant tendencies towards law and towards authority so far as this is lawful. We may now pass to other parts of a child’s behaviour which help to make more clear the existence of such law-abiding impulses.