This mania for correction shows itself too in relation to the authorities themselves. A collection of rebukes and expositions of moral precept supplied by children to their erring parents would be amusing and suggestive. As was illustrated above, a child is especially keen to spy faults in his governors when they are themselves administering authority. Here is another example: A boy of two—the moral instruction of parents by the child begins betimes—would not go to sleep when bidden to do so by his father and mother. At length the father, losing patience, addressed him with a man’s fierce emphasis. This mode of admonition so far from cowering the child simply offended his sense of propriety, for he rejoined: “You s’ouldn’t s’ouldn’t, Assum (_i.e._, ‘Arthur,’ the father’s name), you s’ould speak nicely”. The lengths to which a child with the impulse of moral correction strong in him will sometimes go, are quite appalling. One evening a little girl of six had been repeating the Lord’s prayer. When she had finished, she looked up and said: ‘I don’t like that prayer, you ought not to ask for _bread_, and all that _greediness_, you ought only to ask for goodness!’ There is probably in this an imitative reproduction of something which the child had been told by her mother, or had overheard. Yet allowing for this, one cannot but recognise a quite alarming degree of precocious moral priggishness. We may now turn to what my readers will probably regard as still clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, _viz._, their voluntary submission to its commands. We are apt to think of these little ones as doing right only under external compulsion. But although a child of four may be far from attaining to the state of ‘autonomy of will’ or self-legislation spoken of by the philosopher, he may show a germ of such free adoption of law. It is possible that we see the first faint traces of this in a small child’s way of giving orders to, rebuking, and praising himself. The little girl M., when only twenty months old, would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself: ‘Tay dar’ (stay there). About the same time, after being naughty and squealing ‘like a railway-whistle,’ she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, ‘Be dood, Babba’ (her name). At the age of twenty-two months she had been in the garden and misbehaving by treading on the box border, so that she had to be carried away by her mother. After confessing her fault she wanted to go into the garden again, and promised, ‘Babba will not be naughty adain’. When she was out she looked at the box, saying, “If oo (you) do dat I shall have to take oo in, Babba”. Here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the external control, but they seem to me to indicate a movement in the direction of self-control.