We may now turn to what some will regard as still clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, viz., their spontaneous self-submission to its commands. We are apt to think of these little ones as doing right only when under compulsion: but this is far from the truth. A very young child will show the germ of a disposition freely to adopt a law. A little girl, when only twenty months old, would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself: "Tay dar" (Stay there). About the same time, after being naughty and squealing "like a railway-whistle," she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, "Be dood, Babba" (her name). In like manner the little boy often quoted at the age of twenty months said to himself when walking down the garden, "Sonny darling, mind nettles". Here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the mother's fashion of control, but they seem, too, to indicate a movement in the direction of self-control.
Very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our discipline. The girl just quoted, when less than two years old, would go to her mother and confess some piece of naughtiness and suggest the punishment. A little boy aged two years and four months was deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for scribbling on the wall-paper. His punishment was, however, tempered by permission to draw when taken downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a picture downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse fetched him she wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected, saying: "No, Nanna (name for nurse), look at it till Sunday". And sure enough when Sunday came, and the pencil was restored to him, he promptly showed nurse his picture.
That there is this tendency to fall in with punishment for breach of rule is borne out by some recent questionings of school children in America as to their views of the justice of their punishments. The results appear to show that they regard a large part of their corrections for naughtiness as a matter of course, the younger ones being apparently harsher in their views of what constitutes a proper punishment than the older ones.
These evidences of an impulse to look on correction as a quite proper thing are corroborated by stories of self-punishment. Here is an example: A girl of nine had been naughty, and was very sorry for her misbehaviour. Shortly after she came to her lesson limping, and remarked that she felt very uncomfortable. Being asked by her governess what was the matter with her she said: "It was very naughty of me to disobey you, so I put my right shoe on to my left foot and my left shoe on to my right foot".
The facts here briefly illustrated seem to me to show that there is in the child from the first a rudiment of true law-abidingness, which exists side by side and struggles with the childish love of liberty and rebelliousness. And this is a force of the greatest consequence to the disciplinarian. It is something which takes side in the child's breast with the reasonable governor and the laws which he or she administers. It secures in many cases, at least, a ready compliance with a large part of the discipline enforced.
CHAPTER XI.
AT THE GATE OF THE TEMPLE.
One of the most interesting phases of a child's activity is its groping after what we call art. Although a decided bent towards some special form of our art may be rare among children, most of them betray some rudiment of a feeling for beauty and of an impulse to produce it. It will be well to begin by glancing at the responses of children to the various presentations of beauty in nature and art, and then to examine their attempts at artistic production.