Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/183

Rh he put away his old ones as before for the less fortunate children. Every careful observer of children knows that they are apt to proceed this way, to erect particular actions and suggestions into precedents. This tendency gives something of the amusing priggishness to the ways of childhood.

There is little doubt, I think, that this respect for proper orderly behavior, for precedent and general rule, forms a vital element in the child's submission to parental law. In fixing our attention on occasional acts of disobedience and lawlessness we are apt to overlook the ease, the absence of friction with which normal children, if only decently trained, fall in with the larger part of our observances and ordinances.

That the instinct for order does assist moral discipline may be seen in the fact that children are apt to pay enormous deference to our rules. Nothing is more suggestive here than the talk of children among themselves, the emphasis they are wont to lay on the "must" and "must not." The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law: a rule is apt to present itself to their imagination as a thing supremely sacred and awful before which it prostrates itself.

This recognition of the absolute imperativeness of a rule properly laid down by the recognized authority is seen in children's jealous insistence on the observance of the rule in their own case and in that of others. As has been observed by Preyer, a child of two years and eight months will follow out the prohibitions of the mother when he falls into other hands, sternly protesting, for example, against the nurse giving him the forbidden knife at table. Very proper children rather like to instruct their aunts and other ignorant persons as to the right way of dealing with them, and will rejoice in the opportunity of setting them right even when it means a deprivation for themselves. The self-denying ordinance, "Mamma doesn't let me have many sweets," is by no means beyond the powers of such a child. One can see here, no doubt, traces of a childish sense of self-importance, a feeling of the much-waited-on little sovereign for what befits his supreme worth. Yet, allowing for such elements, there seems to me to be in this behavior a residue of genuine respect for parental law.

These carryings out of the parental behest when intrusted to other hands are instructive as suggesting that the child feels the constraining force of the command when its author is no longer present to enforce it. Perhaps a clearer evidence of respect for the law as such, apart from its particular enforcement by the parent, is supplied by children's way of extending the rules laid down for their own behavior to that of others. This point has already been illustrated in the tendency to universalize the