faithful servant and from one another. From their parents they
received corporal punishment, sometimes a caress. In comparison
with this system, the present way of parents and children
living together would be absolute progress, if parents could
but abstain from explaining, advising, improving, influencing
every thought and every expression. But all spiritual, mental,
and bodily protective rules make the child now indirectly
selfish, because everything centres about him and therefore he
is kept in a constant state of irritation. The six-yearold can
disturb the conversation of the adult, but the twelve-year-old
is sent to bed about eight o'clock, even when he, with wide
open eyes, longs for a conversation that might be to him an
inspiring stimulus for life.

Certainly some simple habits so far as conduct and order,
nourishment and sleep, air and water, clothing and bodily
movement, are concerned, can be made the foundations for the
child's conceptions of morality. He cannot be made to learn
soon enough that bodily health and beauty must be regarded as
high ethical characteristics, and that what is injurious to
health and beauty must be regarded as a hateful act. In this
sphere, children must be kept entirely independent of custom by
allowing the exception to every rule to have its valid place.
The present anxious solicitude that children should eat when
the clock strikes, that they get certain food at fixed meals,
that they be clothed according to the degree of temperature,
that they go to bed when the clock strikes, that they be
protected from every drop of unboiled water and every extra
piece of candy, this makes them nervous, irritable slaves of
habit. A reasonable toughening process against the