In many homes where there are more than two or three children, there is a total lack of domestic sympathy and pride. The children are not taught to love one another nor to understand and help one another. Adult influence is very seldom brought to bear upon them, and, worst of all, parental influence is either wanting, deficient or injurious. What children suffer from this want in the development in their natures must of necessity be, and it unquestionably is, sufficient to handicap them throughout their whole life. Parents profess that they have done their best with this or that child and that they have failed, but the fault largely lies in the parents undertaking the task with every expectation of failure, and the chief characteristics noticed by the child have been the parental irritability, impatience and incompetence. Having estimated these the child then knows exactly how to gain its own ends and has sufficient determination to persevere until it does. A certain amount of harsh treatment will suffice, until the child is old enough to rebel, in order to keep it in check, or, as is just as often the case, the child may be allowed to have its own way entirely. Under such circumstances it is not a matter of great wonderment that the child should be looked upon as a burden to be fed, clothed, and tolerated until it is old enough to "do something" for itself. But our school system is also at fault, for by it our children are crammed with an amount of information the whole, or even the greater part, of which very few of them will ever use. Imagine the object, if one can, of spending the precious hours of a child's educational life in teaching it the names of every dozen or so of the different towns of each county in the United Kingdom, and at the same time entirely neglecting its moral training and giving very little attention to the physical.