do anything just then, but I would have said: 'If you do that any
more I would whip you and send you to bed besides!'" All trace of
revenge has disappeared.

The third stage of punishment is higher still. Jennie is punished in
order to reform her. In the previous examples the _act_ was
all-important. Now Jennie and her moral condition come into the
foreground. None of the younger children take the trouble to explain
to Jennie why it was wrong to paint the parlor chairs. A large
percentage of the older ones do so explain.

A country boy of fourteen says: "I would have took her with me into
the parlor, and I would have talked to her about the injury she had
done to the chairs, and talked kindly to her, and explained to her
that the paints were not what was put on chairs to make them look
nice."

A girl of sixteen says: "I think that the mother was very unwise to
lose her temper over something which the child had done to please
her. I think it would have been far wiser in her to have kissed the
little one, and then explained to her how much mischief she had done
in trying to please her mother."

We can see from this study that the children themselves are capable
of reaching a rather lofty attitude toward wrong-doing and punishment,
yet these children when grown up--that is, we ourselves--so frequently
return to a more primitive way of looking at these problems. In
punishing our children we go back to the method of the five- and
six-year-old.