It is a very significant fact that these characters are but an exaggeration of the characters which in a less degree mark nearly all children. The child is naturally, by his organisation, nearer to the animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the adult. Although this has frequently been noted in a fragmentary manner, it is only of recent years that the study of childhood, a subject of the gravest importance, has been seriously taken up by Perez and others. The child lives in the present; the emotion or the desire of the moment is large enough to blot out for him the whole world; he has no foresight, and is the easier given up to his instincts and passions; our passions, as Hobbes said, bring us near to children. Children are naturally egoists; they will commit all enormities, sometimes, to enlarge their egoistic satisfaction. They are cruel and inflict suffering on animals out of curiosity, enjoying the manifestations of pain. They are thieves for the gratification of their appetites, especially the chief, gluttony, and they are unscrupulous and often cunning liars, not hesitating to put the blame on the innocent when their misdeeds are discovered. The charm of childhood for those who are not children lies largely in these qualities of frank egotism and reckless obedience to impulse. Most people who can recollect their own childhood--an ability which does not, however, appear to be very common--can remember how they have sometimes yielded to overmastering impulses which, although of a trivial character, were distinctly criminal. The trifling, or even normal character of such acts in childhood is too often forgotten by those who have to deal with children. Mayhew, writing in 1862, when these childish “crimes” were still taken seriously to a terrible extent, remarks:--“On our return from Tothill Fields, we consulted with some of our friends as to the various peccadilloes of their youth, and though each we asked had grown to be a man of some little mark in the world, both for intellect and honour, they, one and all, confessed to having committed in their younger days many of the very “crimes” for which the boys at Tothill Fields were incarcerated. For ourselves, we will frankly confess, that at Westminster School, where we passed some seven years of our boyhood, such acts were daily perpetrated; and yet if the scholars had been sent to the House of Correction, instead of Oxford or Cambridge, to complete their education, the country would now have seen many of our playmates working among the convicts in the dockyards, rather than lending dignity to the senate or honour to the bench.”