divine precept without a hundred times a day asking yourself, "How should I like that, if I were not myself?" without continually putting yourself, imaginatively, in someone else's place. And when the child asks, "Why is it wrong to steal?" you can lead him to see how little he would like to have his own possessions stolen. When asked, "Why is it wrong to lie?" you may teach him to imagine his own bitterness if others should deceive him. It is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong because I say so," but if you want to mark it right or wrong—to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on the tables of the heart and the soul, teach the child to see for himself how things are right and wrong -and to judge of them by that one divine and unfailing rule.

Of course, even when the child knows what is right he will not always do it, any more than you do: and one of the questions to be considered, is how you shall deal with those lapses from moral rectitude of which he, no less than you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the old savage punishments, were revenge, and nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay out" the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment is curativethat the fear of punishment will deter people from doing wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his opinion only the other day, that punishment, no matter how severe, will not act as a deterrent, if there be ever so slight a chance of the criminal's escaping it. What would deter would be the certainty of punishment, however slight. Now since you are not omniscient you cannot pretend to your child that if he does wrong, you are certain to know and to punish him: if you are silly enough to pretend it he will find you out quite soon,

and estimate your lie at its true blackness. You can, however, without any pretence, assure him that if he does wrong he himself will know it, that it will make him feel dirty, and nasty, and miserable, till he is able to wash himself in the waters of repentance and forgiveness: that if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel mean and dirty, and if he acts bravely and cleanly he will feel brave and clean. And he will find that what you say is true. But not unless you shall have suceeded in convincing him that it is a true standard, and that the things which that standard shows to be wrong are wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of the imagination; teach the child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged, that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.

No one desires, of course, that a child should be always feeling his own moral pulse: if he has learned that there is a right and a wrong way, he will not be always bothering about which way he may be living-it will be only when something goes amiss that he will stop and consider. Just as one does not stop to think whether one is breathing properly; only when one chokes, one knows that one isn't.

Punishment, however, should not be confused with the consequences of action, and I think it is not Jesuitical to suggest that, with very small children, such consequences may well be a little exaggerated, so as to point the moral. I mean that one may honorably apply, to the small wrong-doings of childhood, the sort of consequences -proportioned, of course, to the wrong-doing which would result from such wrong-doing, on a larger scale, by a grown-up person. It will be exceedingly troublesome and painful for you, but perhaps its painfulness to you may be the measure of its value to the child. For instance,

Tommy steals a penny, knowing that to steal pennies is wrong. He is very little, and a penny is very little, and your impulse, if not to slap him, might be to tell him that he is a very naughty boy and have done with it. It will go to your heart to bring home to him quietly and inexorably the consequences of theft, especially as you cannot do it in the first urgent rush of your moral condemnation; but if, next time you are about to send him to the shop for something, you say, “No, I can't send you because you might steal my pennies as you did the other day," this will be hateful for you to do, but

The New Witness.

it will show him more plainly than anything else what happens to people who steal. They are not trusted. And the same with lies. Show him that those who tell lies are not believed.

But, remembering how it felt to be a child, have pity, and do not teach him these lessons when anyone else is there. Let the humiliation of them be a secret between you two alone. Only when a wrong has been done which demands a restitution or an amende should the soul of the child, shamed with wrong-doing, be exposed to alien

eyes.

E. Nesbit.

To tell a pretty story of a blind girl and her devoted mother, to intertwine it with the happy closing chapters of the mother's romance, and to make the combination an indirect description of the new South and a tribute to its energetic women is an ambitious undertaking, but Mrs. Isla May Mullins's "The Blossom Shop" shows that it is quite within her powers. To direct the narrative so that it naturally culminates in the recovery of the sweet little girl's eyesight, and in three weddings seems easy to her, but, as "Easy reading means hard writing" is a perfectly veracious saying, much toil must have been expended upon the brief story to bring it to its actual excellence. It is prettily illustrated with four pictures by Mr. John Goss. L. C. Page & Co.

til he is close upon the last page. The man, a curate of High Church proclivities, and a perfect magnet for comic adventures, becomes uncertain in his faith, and falls in love with a hard-riding scion of a family devoted to racing; and the girl deliberately sins, and comes to confess to him as a clergyman, and to inquire where she can find God, a little matter that begins to interest her after she has decided to marry her fellow-sinner, some equestrian feats, undertaken partly in the hope of killing herself, having most vexatiously proved ineffectual. Matters are a little complicated by the lady's saving the curate's life, and by the curate's discovery that while he has been ransacking ritualistic manuals to find a way to array himself on the side of his Maker, he has been neglecting a plain duty, which would have guided him thither, but Mr. Bashford is quite capable of leading him into the right path. One hardly expects the man's problem in exegesis, and the woman's attempt to account for the workings of Providence to be solved as

simply and directly as they are in the story, but it would be no kindness to anybody concerned to reveal the solution and catastrophe, especially as the book is not too big to be read in a few hours. It will horrify not a few by its calm presentation of a young lady who swears as easily as any old sailor, or veteran stage driver, but such, according to the British journalist, is just now the speech of certain young persons enrolled in the baronetage of England. Mr. Bashford makes the creature successively farcical and tragic, and not in the least like a caricature, and a good piece of literary work is the result. Edifying? No, it is a novel, not a homily. Henry Holt & Co.

Berlin is the scene of Mr. William Wriothesley's "The Ambassadress," and the great truths that a man should marry a fortune and that a girl should marry a title, and that, once married, neither girl nor man needs to worry about any of the obligations mentioned in the prayer-book are the principles as to which girls and men, maid and matron, discourse with frigid, cynical unanimity. The Ambassadress herself is more concerned about a man whom she loved before her marriage, than about her little son, but her stepdaughter, having been thrown aside by the same man, quietly asks to be informed why a husband should be "a mere mustard-plaster, a kind of remedy for all manner of evil." "You should have taught me a trade," she instructs her stepmother; "I think something will surely turn up in which I can be useful." The "something" is provided by a motor-car which runs over her little half-brother, as he races about the Berlin roadways on rollerskates, and fractures most of his bones, while his mother is arranging the affairs of Europe. Too late, his mother feels that she has lost the em

pire of the greatest consequence to her, and her step-daughter sees that her desired vocation is to make her halfbrother happy. Mr. Wriothesley does not preach; he leaves other ambassadresses and other dowerless girls to interpret him, contenting himself with showing how these two worked out their destiny, and constructs a story abounding in spirited, intelligent talk, contrasting well with the enormously conceited utterances of a German prince seeking a purchaser for his title and name. The book is not cheerful, but it is never bitter, and never undignified. Mr. Henry James's "The Ambassador" has a worthy counterpart in "The Ambassadress." George H. Doran Company.

M. Edouard Le Roy's "The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson" SO abounds in enthusiasm that it fairly sweeps a sympathetic reader from his moorings and speeds him on his course towards acceptance of the theory of the simple unity of productive intuition with a pleasing violence. It is by "considering this philosophy as a living act, not as a rather clever discourse, by examining the peculiar excellence of its soul, rather than the formation of its body, that the inquirer will succeed in understanding it," says M. Le Roy. To a coldblooded person such an injunction seems to demand unconditional acceptance of the philosophy in question, and in the two chapters of his "General View" M. Le Roy falls little short of commanding it. Small wonder that M. Bergson found deep sympathy of thought in them, when they appeared as articles in the Revue de Deux Mondes but in commending them he went still further, and attributed to M. Le Roy the power of rethinking the subject in a personal and original manner and declared himself willing to accept his critic's views as