But, though we are repeatedly casting our seed in the field of juvenile literature, we are not reaping the full harvest, because we are not living in the land of childhood merrily. Start as you will to treat of children’s books as the mere vehicle for giving joy, and education will pursue you. Acknowledging all the benefits that the moral tale and the instructive walk have bestowed, we know not which to pity most--the child in a moral strait-jacket, or the child observing nature! The terms we use in describing these writers of a past generation are always the same; they are not prepossessing, though they may sound quaint. We turn from such critical phrases as “flabby treatment of the Bible,” “dear, didactic, deadly dull” Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth’s “overplus of sublime purpose,” to definite terms of protest such as those of the “Professor at the Breakfast Table,” condemning the little meek sufferers with their spiritual exercises, and those of Emerson ending in his cry of “What right have you to _one_ virtue!” The mistaken attitude, which has slipped from the moral to the educational sphere, seems to be that self-development is not just as important as prescribed courses. While the latter are necessary to the school, the librarian must reckon differently; for, to her, the child is not so much a class as a unit. Elementary education is marked by the compulsory factor; in reading, a child’s interest is voluntary. On the other hand, the severity of a Puritan Sunday, the grimness of a New England Primer, developed in childhood sound principles of righteousness; they erected a high fence between heaven and hell. But the moral tale utilised “little meannesses of conventional life,” suggested sly deceit and trivial pettiness; it quibbled and its ethics were often doubtful. The reaction that followed let slip a valuable adjunct in culture; to-day the knowledge of the Bible in schools and colleges is appallingly shallow; this fact was revealed in the results of an examination or test held by President Thwing some years ago. Dr. Felix Adler, pleading from the non-sectarian platform, asks for the re-establishment of ethics in our schools as a study of social relations, and for the extended use of Bible stories, shorn of religious meaning, yet robbed of none of their essential strength or beauty or truth. The librarian has wisely mapped out for her story hour such a course, gleaned from the parables, and from the vast treasure houses of narrative abounding in both Testaments and in fables. Turn to your colleges and your schools, and you will find that, generally speaking, there is dug a deep channel between literature and life, which has no right to be. We should study our ethics as one of the inherent elements in poetry and in prose. The moral _habit_ is part of the structure of the Arthurian legends.