Defeated and depressed, but unconvinced, the boy shuffled sullenly around the corner of the house and out behind the barn where he raged and rebelled at the autocratic exercise of the authority of which he had been the victim, until present desire overcame the fear of future punishment and soon the old swimming hole resounded with the splash of another lithe, young body. His disobedience was the logical sequence of an attitude which violated both the principles of psychology and the dictates of reason and justice. If the mother had assigned any reasonable excuse for withholding her permission she would have measurably satisfied her son’s sense of fairness and justice, however reluctantly his acquiescence, prompted by the denial of personal pleasure, may have been given. Instead, she unconsciously chose a course which planted the seed of disobedience and evasion whose ultimate fruition might even be rebellion against all maternal authority, and following that--delinquency. The boy is a rational human being, however much we may ignore his capacity for reason, and the continued violation of his standards of right and justice will ultimately destroy those standards and compel him to adopt a code based on expediency instead of morals. Laws are obeyed by adults in the proportion that they are supported by public opinion as being just and reasonable; and, conversely, they are disobeyed when deemed unjustly restrictive or violative of personal rights. Witness the disregard for sumptuary laws in certain local communities which entertain convictions against the abridgment of their so-called personal liberties, where such laws have been imposed by the legislative enactment of a state the majority of whose voters favor prohibition. Some of our reputedly good citizens evade the payment of a large part of the taxes imposed on them by law for the reason that they believe the tax laws to be inequitable and unjust in placing too great a burden on one class, with a corresponding exemption to another class.