It is in all cases the certainty, and not the severity, of punishment which constitutes its power.
_Suppose one is not at the Beginning_.
What has been said thus far relates obviously to cases where the mother is at the commencement of her work of training.

This is the way to _begin_; but you can not begin unless you are at the beginning.

If your children are partly grown, and you find that they are not under your command, the difficulty is much greater.

The principles which should govern the management are the same, but they can not be applied by means so gentle.
The prison, it may be, must now be somewhat more real, the terms of imprisonment somewhat longer, and there may be cases of insubordination so decided as to require the offender to be carried to it by force, on account of his refusal to go of his own accord, and perhaps to be held there, or even to be tied.

Cases requiring treatment so decisive as this must be very rare with children under ten years of age; and when they occur, the mother has reason to feel great self-condemnation--or at least great self-abasement--at finding that she has failed so entirely in the first great moral duty of the mother, which is to train her children to complete submission to her authority from the beginning.
_Children coming under New Control_.
Sometimes, however, it happens that children are transferred from one charge to another, so that the one upon whom the duty of government devolves, perhaps only for a time, finds that the child or children put under his or her charge have been trained by previous mismanagement to habits of utter insubordination.