Shame, when it once becomes familiar to the mind, loses its effect; it should not, therefore, be used as a common punishment for slight faults. Nor should we trust very early in education to the delicate secret influence of conscience; but we should take every precaution to prevent the necessity of having recourse to the punishment of disgrace; and we must, if we mean to preserve the power of conscience, take care that it be never disregarded with impunity. We must avoid opposing it to strong temptation; nor should we ever try the integrity of children, except in situations where we can be perfectly certain of the result of the experiment. We must neither run the risk of injuring them by unjust suspicions, nor unmerited confidence. By prudent arrangements, and by unremitted daily attention, we should absolutely prevent the possibility of deceit. By giving few commands, or prohibitions, we may avoid the danger of either secret or open disobedience. By diminishing temptations to do wrong, we act more humanely than by multiplying restraints and punishments.
It has been found, that no restraints or punishments have proved adequate to ensure obedience to laws, whenever strong temptations, and many probabilities of evasion, combine in opposition to conscience or fear. The terrors of the law have been for years ineffectually directed against a race of beings called smugglers: yet smuggling is still an extensive, lucrative, and not universally discreditable, profession. Let any person look into the history of the excise laws, and he will be astonished at the accumulation of penal statutes, which the active, but ineffectual, ingenuity of prohibitory legislators has devised in the course of about thirty years. Open war was declared against all illegal distillers; yet the temptation to illegal distilling continually increased, in proportion to the heavy duties laid upon the fair trader. It came at length to a trial of skill between revenue officers and distillers, which could cheat, or which could detect, the fastest. The distiller had the strongest interest in the business, and he usually came off victorious. Coursing officers, and watching officers (once ten watching officers were set upon one distiller) and surveyors and supervisors, multiplied without end: the land in their fiscal maps was portioned out into divisions and districts, and each gauger had the charge of all the distillers in his division: the watching officer went first, and the coursing officer went after him, and after him the supervisor; and they had table-books, and gauging-rods, and dockets, and permits; permits for sellers, and permits for buyers, and permits for foreign spirits, printed in red ink, and permits for British spirits, in black ink; and they went about night and day with their hydrometers, to ascertain the strength of spirits; and with their gauging-rods, to measure wash. But the pertinacious distiller was still flourishing; permits were forged; concealed pipes were fabricated; and the proportion between the wash and spirits was seldom legal. The commisioners complained, and the legislators went to work again. Under a penalty of one hundred pounds, distillers were ordered to paint the words distiller, dealer in spirits, over their doors; and it was further enacted, that all the distillers should furnish, at their own expense, any kind of locks, and fastenings, which the revenue officers should require for locking up the doors of their own furnaces, the heads of their own stills, pumps, pipes, &c. First, suspicions fell upon the public distiller for exportation; then his utensils were locked up; afterwards the private distiller was suspected, and he was locked up: then they set him and his furnaces at liberty, and went back in a passion to the public distiller. The legislature condescended to interfere, and with a new lock and key, precisely described in an act of parliament, it was hoped all would be made secure. Any person being a distiller, who should lock up his furnace or pipes with a key constructed differently from that which the act described, or any person making such illegal key for said distiller, was subject to the forfeiture of one hundred pounds. The padlock was never fixed upon the mind, and even the lock and key, prescribed by act of parliament, were found inefficacious. Any common blacksmith, with a picklock in his possession, laughed at the combined skill of the two houses of parliament.
This digression from the rewards and punishments of children, to the distillery laws, may, it is hoped, be pardoned, if the useful moral can be drawn from it, that, where there are great temptations to fraud, and continual opportunities of evasion, no laws, however ingenious, no punishments, however exorbitant, can avail. The history of coiners, venders, and utterers, of his majesty’s coin, as lately detailed to us by respectable authority, may afford further illustration of this principle.
There is no imminent danger of children’s becoming either coiners or fraudulent distillers; but an ingenious preceptor will not be much puzzled in applying the remarks that have been made, to the subject of education. For the anticlimax, in descending from the legislation of men to the government of children, no apology is attempted.
The fewer the laws we make for children, the better. Whatever they may be, they should be distinctly expressed; the letter and spirit should both agree, and the words should bear but one signification, clear to all the parties concerned. They should never be subject to the ex post facto interpretation of an angry preceptor, or a cunning pupil; no loose general terms should permit tyranny, or encourage quibbling. There is said to be a Chinese law, which decrees, that whoever does not show proper respect to the sovereign, is to be punished with death. What is meant by the words proper respect, is not defined. Two persons made a mistake in some account of an insignificant affair, in one of their court gazettes. It was declared, that to lie in a court gazette, is to be wanting in proper respect to the court. Both the careless scribes were put to death. One of the princes of the blood inadvertently put some mark upon a memorial, which had been signed by the emperor Bogdo Chan. This was construed to be a want of proper respect to Bogdo Chan the emperor, and a horrible persecution hence arose against the scrawling prince and his whole family. May no schoolmasters, ushers, or others, ever (even as far as they are able) imitate Bogdo Chan, and may they always define to their subjects, what they mean by proper respect!
There is a sort of mistaken mercy sometimes shown to children, which is, in reality, the greatest cruelty. People, who are too angry to refrain from threats, are often too indolent, or too compassionate, to put their threats in execution. Between their words and actions there is hence a manifest contradiction; their pupils learn from experience, either totally to disregard these threats, or else to calculate, from the various degrees of anger which appear in the threatener’s countenance, what real probability there is of his being as good or as bad as his word. Far from perceiving that punishment, in this case, is pain given with the reasonable hope of making him wiser or happier, the pupil is convinced, that his master punishes him only to gratify the passion of anger, to which he is unfortunately subject. Even supposing that threateners are exact in fulfilling their threats, and that they are not passionate, but simply wish to avoid giving pain; they endeavour to excite the fears of their pupils as the means of governing them with the least possible pain. But with fear they excite all the passions and habits which are connected with that mean principle of action, and they extinguish that vigorous spirit, that independent energy of soul, which is essential to all the active and manly virtues. Young people, who find that their daily pleasures depend not so much upon their own exertions as upon the humour and caprice of others, become absolute courtiers; they practise all the arts of persuasion, and all the crouching hypocrisy which can deprecate wrath, or propitiate favour. Their notions of right and wrong cannot be enlarged; their recollection of the rewards and punishments of their childhood, is always connected with the ideas of tyranny and slavery; and when they break their own chains, they are impatient to impose similar bonds upon their inferiors.
An argument has been used to prove, that in some cases anger is part of the justice of punishment, because “mere reproof, without sufficient marks of displeasure and emotion, affects a child very little, and is soon forgotten.” It cannot be doubted, that the expression of indignation is a just consequence of certain faults, and the general ind
ignation with which these are spoken of before young people, must make a strong and useful impression upon their minds. They reflect upon the actions of others; they see the effects which these produce upon the human mind; they put themselves in the situation alternately of the person who expresses indignation, and of him who suffers shame; they measure the fault and its consequences, and they resolve to conduct themselves so as to avoid that just indignation of which they dread to be the object. These are the general conclusions which children draw when they are impartial spectators; but where they are themselves concerned, their feelings and their reasonings are very different. If they have done any thing which they know to be wrong, they expect, and are sensible that they deserve, displeasure and indignation; but if any precise penalty is annexed to the fault, the person who is to inflict it, appears to them in the character of a judge, who is bound to repress his own feelings, and coolly to execute justice. If the judge both reproaches and punishes, he doubles the punishment. Whenever indignation is expressed, no vulgar trivial penalties should accompany it; the pupil should feel that it is indignation against his fault, and not against himself; and that it is not excited in his preceptor’s mind by any petty personal considerations. A child distinguishes between anger and indignation very exactly; the one commands his respect, the other raises his contempt as soon as his fears subside. Dr. Priestley seems to think that, “it is not possible to express displeasure with sufficient force, especially to a child, when a man is perfectly cool.” May we not reply to this, that it is scarcely possible to express displeasure with sufficient propriety, especially to a child, when a man is in a passion? The propriety is, in this case, of at least as much consequence as the force of the reprimand. — The effect which the preceptor’s displeasure will produce, must be, in some proportion, to the esteem which his pupil feels for him. If he cannot command his irascible passions, his pupil cannot continue to esteem him; and there is an end of all that fear of his disapprobation, which was founded upon esteem, and which can never be founded upon a stronger or a better basis. We should further consider, that the opinions of all the bystanders, especially if they be any of them of the pupil’s own age, have great influence upon his mind. It is not to be expected that they should all sympathize equally with the angry preceptor; and we know, that whenever the indignation expressed against any fault, appears, in the least, to pass the bound of exact justice, the sympathy of the spectators immediately revolts in favour of the culprit; the fault is forgotten or excused, and all join in spontaneous compassion. In public schools, this happens so frequently, that the master’s displeasure seldom affects the little community with any sorrow; combined together, they make each other amends for public punishments, by private pity or encouragement. In families, which are not well regulated, that is to say, in which the interests of all the individuals do not coalesce, the same evils are to be dreaded. Neither indignation nor shame can affect children in such schools, or such families; the laws and manners, public precept and private opinion, contradict one another.
In a variety of instances in society, we may observe, that the best laws and the best principles are not sufficient to resist the combination of numbers. Never attempt to affix infamy to a number of people at once, says a philosophic legislator. This advice showed that he perfectly understood the nature of the passion of shame. Numbers keep one another in countenance; they form a society for themselves; and sometimes by peculiar phrases, and an appropriate language, confound the established opinions of virtue and vice, and enjoy a species of self-complacency independent of public opinion, and often in direct opposition to their former conscience. Whenever any set of men want to get rid of the shame annexed to particular actions, they begin by changing the names and epithets which have been generally used to express them, and which they know are associated with the feelings of shame: these feelings are not awakened by the new language, and by degrees they are forgotten, or they are supposed to have been merely prejudices and habits, which former methods of speaking taught people to reverence. Thus the most disgraceful combinations of men, who live by violating and evading the laws of society, have all a peculiar phraseology amongst themselves, by which jocular ideas are associated with the most disreputable actions.
Those who live by depredation on the river Thames, do not call themselves thieves, but lumpers and mudlarks. Coiners give regular mercantile names to the different branches of their trade, and to the various kinds of false money which they circulate: such as flats, or figs, or fig-things. Unlicensed lottery wheels, are called little goes; and the men who are sent about to public houses to entice poor people into illegal lottery insurances, are called Morocco-men: a set of villains, hired by these fraudulent lottery keepers, to resist the civil power during the drawing of the lottery, call themselves bludgeon-men; and in the language of robbers, a receiver of stolen goods is said to be staunch, when it is believed that he will go all lengths rather than betray the secrets of a gang of highwaymen.
Since words have such power in their turn over ideas, we must, in education, attend to the language of children as a means of judging of the state of their minds; and whenever we find, that in their conversation with one another, they have any slang, which turns moral ideas into ridicule, we may be certain that this must have arisen from some defect in their education. The power of shame must then be tried in some new shape, to break this false association of ideas. Shame, in a new shape, affects the mind with surprising force, in the same manner as danger in a new form alarms the courage of veterans. An extraordinary instance of this, may be observed in the management of Gloucester jail: a blue and yellow jacket has been found to have a most powerful effect upon men supposed to be dead to shame. The keeper of the prison told us, that the most unruly offenders could be kept in awe by the dread of a dress which exposed them to the ridicule of their companions, no new term having been yet invented to counteract the terrors of the yellow jacket. To prevent the mind from becoming insensible to shame, it must be very sparingly used; and the hope and possibility of recovering esteem, must always be kept alive. Those who are excluded from hope, are necessarily excluded from virtue; the loss of reputation, we see, is almost always followed by total depravity. The cruel prejudices which are harboured against particular classes of people, usually tend to make the individuals who are the best disposed amongst these sects, despair of obtaining esteem; and, consequently, careless about deserving it. There can be nothing inherent in the knavish propensity of Jews; but the prevailing opinion, that avarice, dishonesty and extortion, are the characteristics of a Jew, has probably induced many of the tribe to justify the antipathy which they could not conquer. Children are frequently confirmed in faults, by the imprudent and cruel custom which some parents have of settling early in life, that such a thing is natural; that such and such dispositions are not to be cured; that cunning, perhaps, is the characteristic of one child, and caprice of another. This general odium oppresses and dispirits: such children think it is in vain to struggle against nature, especially as they do not clearly understand what is meant by nature. They submit to our imputations, without knowing how to refute them. On the contrary, if we treat them with more good sense and benevolence, if we explain to them the nature of the human mind, and if we lay open to them the history of their own, they will assist us in endeavouring to cure their faults, and they will not be debilitated by indistinct, superstitious fears. At ten or eleven years old, children are capable of understanding some of the general principles of rational morality, and these they can apply to their own conduct in many instances, which, however trivial they may appear, are not beneath our notice.
June 16, 1796. S —— (nine years old) had lost his pencil; his father said to him, “I wish to give you another pencil, but I am afraid I should do you harm if I did; you would not take care of your things if you did not feel some inconvenience when you lose them.” The boy’s lips moved as if he were saying to himself, “I understand this; it is just.” His father guessed that these were t
he thoughts that were passing in his mind, and asked whether he interpreted rightly the motion of the lips. “Yes,” said S —— , “that was exactly what I was thinking.” “Then,” said his father, “I will give you a bit of my own pencil this instant: all I want is to make the necessary impression upon your mind; that is all the use of punishment; you know we do not want to torment you.”
As young people grow up, and perceive the consequences of their own actions, and the advantages of credit and character, they become extremely solicitous to preserve the good opinion of those whom they love and esteem. They are now capable of taking the future into their view as well as the present; and at this period of their education, the hand of authority should never be hastily used; the voice of reason will never fail to make herself heard, especially if reason speak with the tone of affection. During the first years of childhood, it did not seem prudent to make any punishment lasting, because young children quickly forget their faults; and having little experience, cannot feel how their past conduct is likely to affect their future happiness: but as soon as they have more enlarged experience, the nature of their punishments should alter; if we have any reason to esteem or love them less, our contempt and displeasure should not lightly be dissipated. Those who reflect, are more influenced by the idea of the duration, than of the intensity of any mental pain. In those calculations which are constantly made before we determine upon action or forbearance, some tempers estimate any evil which is likely to be but of short duration, infinitely below its real importance. Young men, of sanguine and courageous dispositions, hence frequently act imprudently; the consequences of their temerity will, they think, soon be over, and they feel that they are able to support evil for a short time, however great it may be. Anger, they know, is a short-lived passion, and they do not scruple running the hazard of exciting anger in the hearts of those they love the best in the world. The experience of lasting, sober disapprobation, is intolerably irksome to them; any inconvenience which continues for a length of time, wearies them excessively. After they have endured, as the consequence of any actions, this species of punishment, they will long remember their sufferings, and will carefully avoid incurring, in future, similar penalties. Sudden and transient pain appears to be most effectual with persons of an opposite temperament.
Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth Page 710
