III
In order that a parent shall properly influence a child's character, it is necessary for him to know what that character is, and what the nature is of each fault with which he is dealing. I feel almost like asking pardon for saying anything so self-evident. It seems like saying that a physician who is called to a sick-bed, before beginning to prescribe, should know the nature of the disease for which he is prescribing, should not prescribe for one disease when he is dealing with another.
I do not know enough about physicians to say whether such mistakes ever happen among them; but that such egregious mistakes do occur among parents all the time, I am sure. There are many parents who never stop to ask before they punish—that is, before they prescribe their moral remedies—what the nature of the disease is with which their child is afflicted. They never take the trouble to make a diagnosis of the case in order to treat it correctly. There is perhaps not one parent in a thousand who has a clear idea of the character of his child, or to whom it even so much as occurs that he ought to have a clear conception of that character, a map of it, a chart of it, laid out, as it were, in his mind. The trouble is that attention is not usually called to this important matter, and I purpose to make it the special subject of this address.