The naughtiest and most mischievous boy not infrequently develops into a hero, or a leader of men.

The explanation of this is that through his very naughtiness the current of soul-growth, which ran stronger in him than in his school-mates, kept open the channel which his teachers were doing their best to close.

Even Hooliganism--to take the most serious of the periodic outbursts of juvenile criminality--resolves itself, when thoughtfully considered, into a sudden and violent change in the channel of a boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels) of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational repression.

His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself, before it finally gives up the struggle for active existence.
* * * * * When severity and constraint have done their work, when the spirit of the child has been broken, when his vitality has been lowered to its barest minimum, when he has been reduced to a state of mental and moral serfdom, the time has come for the system of education through mechanical obedience to be applied to him in all its rigour.

In other words, the time has come for Man to do to the child, what the God whom he worships is supposed to have done to him,--to tell him in the fullest and minutest detail what he is to do to be "saved," and to stand over him with a scourge in his hand and see that he does it.