Picture to yourself a dark hallway. Behind the door stands an indignant mother with a strap in her hand. It is past the dinner hour and William has not yet returned. But here he is now. He comes bounding up the steps, radiantly happy, and under each arm a pumpkin. He bursts into the house. His mother seizes him by the shoulder and proceeds to apply the strap where she thinks it will do the most good. The little boy is William J. Stillman, and the story is told in his autobiography. He tells how just an hour before dinner a neighboring farmer had asked him to go to his field to shake down the fruit from two apple trees. William was so glad to do something for which he would receive pay that he allowed the work to trench upon his dinner-time. The two large pumpkins he brought were his pay, and he knew that they meant a great deal to his needy family. Stillman, in writing of the incident, continues: "It is more than sixty years since that punishment fell on my shoulders, but the astonishment with which I received the flogging, instead of the thanks which I anticipated for the wages I was bringing her, the haste with which any mother administered it lest my father should anticipate her and beat me after his own fashion, are as vivid in my recollection as if it had taken place yesterday." While I hope that not many of us are guilty of such flagrant abuse of our power as is described above, still I am certain that on many occasions we punish just as hastily, without giving a chance for explanation and with as little thought as to whether "the punishment fits the crime." I have often been impressed by the great interest that mothers take in uses of punishment and in kinds of punishment. It has sometimes seemed as if the most valuable thing which they could carry away with them from some child-study meeting was a new kind of punishment for some very common offence. I have frequently felt as if the only contact some mothers have with their children is to punish them, and that punishment constituted the chief part of the poor children's training. Now, punishment undoubtedly has a place in the training of children, but only a _negative_ place. The proper punishment, administered in the right spirit, may cure or correct a fault; _but punishment does not make children good_. If children are punished frequently, it may even make them _bad_. We can all remember some of the punishments of our own childhood. How unjust they seemed then, and do even now, after all these years to heal the wounds! How outraged we felt! Into how unloving a mood they put us!