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698 mitted to the cause of infant education, in the new sense. The deepest needs of the young child, disguised as they are by his energy and zest, are most often not superficially evident, are obscure to the child himself, and, as we know, are totally unsuspected by the parent. One comes to perceive what is due to babyhood through long, sad consideration of the case of the average adult.

Diagnosis of this adult, or rather of his mental state, has been pretty thoroughly made. It is conceded that the most lamentable habit this has revealed is that of surrender to herd psychology. His amiable incapacity to think or act for himself in any real sense has been made tragically plain. Cases are also rare in which legitimate development in one or more directions hasn't been arrested or distorted. These facts are no longer to be questioned. But if the serious conditions that they correspond to can be remedied to any extent, then the effort to do this surely becomes the one supremely important undertaking. The only debatable point is whether the educator's solicitude should be directed toward the human being at birth, or whether he can afford to wait a brief interval. Roughly speaking, it is clear that human development is past control at twenty. It is perhaps almost equally clear that it is past control at fifteen. What is beginning to be seen is that in the essential sense the same is true of ten—and that if we are honestly concerned to promote the really free and complete development of human beings, the attempt to do this must begin practically in babyhood. The argument is thoroughly logical in itself, and unhappily for childhood, the world is full of evidence to support it. If infancy were not inarticulate and weak, it would never have waited for a chance handful of elders to contrive its revolution for it. Infancy must always have known better.

For consider, from his own point of view, the life of a four-year-old in any "sheltered home." Consider what a base level he occupies in the domestic hierarchy, how officiously he is buttoned and swathed, pushed and pursued, forced and forbidden, how to an almost intolerable degree he is made the buffer for adult emotion, even as adult mood and adult convenience determine practically the entire arrangement of his life. Consider how his desires and impulses are derided, his tastes ignored, his will thwarted. Consider the cases in which he is the helpless victim of a nurse-maid one hasn't the patience to characterize; or those in which he is some-