We can fail and make children disloyal instead of loyal subjects by unduly magnifying our office, by insisting too much on our authority. Children who are over-ruled, who have no taste of being left unmolested and free to do what they like, can hardly be expected to submit graciously. Another way of carrying parental control to excess is by exacting displays of virtue which are beyond the moral capabilities of the child. A lady sends me this reminiscence of her childhood. She had been promised sixpence when she could play her scales without fault, and succeeded in the exploit on her sixth birthday. The sixpence was given to her, but soon after her mother suggested that she should spend the money in fruit to give to her (the mother’s) invalid friend. This was offending the sense of justice, for if the child is jealous of anything as his very own it is surely the reward he has earned; and was, moreover, a foolish attempt to call forth generosity where generosity was wholly out of place. An even worse example is that recorded by Ruskin. When a child he was expected to come down to dessert and crack nuts for the grand older folk while peremptorily forbidden to eat any. Such refined cruelties of government deserve to be defeated in their objects. Much of our ill success in governing children would probably turn out to be attributable to unwisdom in assigning tasks, and more particularly in making exactions which wound that sensitive fibre of a child’s heart, the sense of justice. Parents are, I fear, apt to forget that generosity and the other liberal virtues owe their worth to their spontaneity. They may be suggested and encouraged but cannot be exacted. On the other hand, a parent cannot be more foolish than to discourage a spontaneous outgoing of good impulse, as if nothing were good but what emanated from a spirit of obedience. In a pretty and touching little American work, _Beckonings from Little Hands_, the writer describes the remorse of a father who, after his child’s death, recalled the little fellow’s first crude endeavour to help him by bringing fuel, an endeavour which, alas! he had met with something like a rebuff. The right method of training, which develops and strengthens by bracing exercise the instinct of obedience, cannot easily be summarised; for it is the outcome of the highest wisdom. I may, however, be permitted to indicate one or two of its main features.