Free speech and the grouping, classing, and mingling of men according to intellect, and not according to income, have begun already. They are not more the outcome than they are the cause of these citizens’ movements. They are the same elemental thing. The love of truth is the same passion as the veneration for the individual. It is impossible to really want reform and to remain socially exclusive or socially deferential. And so, a social life is beginning to emerge in New York, based on the noblest and the most natural passion that can stir in the heart of man The results in the field of practical politics, will be that “society”--at least such of our drawing-rooms and dinner tables as any one, whether foreigner or native, knows or cares anything about--will resume the political importance which such places have always held in civilized times, and of which nothing but extraordinary and transient conditions have deprived them. Let any one who doubts this, compare the club talk and dinner table talk of to-day, with the talk of ten years ago. It would be childish to guess the positive results on the arts, theatres, novels, verse which will follow; but you can no more keep the spirit of freedom out of these things than you can keep it out of personal manners. These are changing daily. The decorums and codes of behavior, the old self-consciousness and self-distrust are dropping off. Steadily the flood of life advances, inspiring all things. EDUCATION: FROEBEL III EDUCATION: FROEBEL I have two boys, aged seven and four. They required a governess and I got one. After a couple of months during which the usual experiences in the training of young children were gone through, I discovered that it was I who was being educated. My mind was being swayed and drawn to a point of view. I was in contact with a method so profound that it seemed as if I were dealing with, or rather being dealt with by the forces of nature. I was in the presence of great genius. What was it? The text book on Froebel by Hughes in the International Series on Education made the matter clear. Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had received their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.