"Your paper has been intensely interesting to me. I have always held that a true teacher was really a mother, though of a very large flock, just as a true mother is really a teacher, though of a very small school. The two points of view complete each other and I doubt if either mother or teacher can see truly without the other. They tell us, you know, that our two eyes, with their slight divergence of position, are necessary to make us, see things as having more than one side; and the mother and the teacher, one seeing the individual child, the other the child as the member of the race, need each other to see the child as the complex, many-sided individual he really is. "In your school, do you manage to get the mothers to co-operate? Here, I am trying to get near my children's teachers. They try, too; but it is not altogether easy for any of us. We need some common meeting ground--some neutral activity which we could share. If you have any suggestions, I shall be glad to have them. Of course, I visit school and the teachers visit me, and we are friendly in an arm's length sort of fashion. That is largely because they believe in corporal punishment and practice it freely and it is hard for us to look straight at each other over this disagreement." CORPORAL PUNISHMENT. To the Matron of a Girls' Orphan Asylum "Now to the specific questions you ask. My answers must, of course, be based upon general principles--the special application, often so very difficult a matter, must be left to you. To begin with corporal punishment. You say you are 'personally opposed, but that your early training and the literal interpretation of Solomon's rod keep you undecided.' Surely your own comment later shows that part, at least, of the influence of your early training was _against_ corporal punishment, because you saw and felt its evils in yourself. Such early training may have made you unapt in thinking of other means of discipline; but it can hardly have made you think of corporal punishment as _right_. "And how can anyone take Solomon's rod any more literally than she does the Savior's cross? We are bid, on a higher authority than Solomon's proverbs, to take up our cross and follow Him. This we all interpret figuratively. Would you dream, for instance, of binding heavy crosses of wood upon the backs of your children because you felt yourselves so enjoined in the literal sense of the Scriptures? Why, then, take the rod literally? It is as clearly used to designate any form of orderly discipline as the cross is used to designate endurance of necessary sorrows. 'The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive.'