They are nearly all tall, straight children. All are straight, indeed, if not tall, but the average is a big, well-made child with clean skin, bright eyes, and silky hair. He or she is a little above the average of the best type of well-to-do child of the upper middle class. So much for his or her physique. Mentally he is alert, sociable, eager for life and new experience. He can read and spell perfectly, or almost perfectly. He writes well and expresses himself easily. He speaks good English and also French. He can not only help himself, but he or she has for years helped younger children: and he can count and measure and design and has had some preparation for science. His first years were spent in an atmosphere of love and calm and _fun_, and his last two years were full of interesting experiences and experiment. He knows about a garden, and has planted and watered, and taken care of plants as well as animals. The seven-year-old can dance, too, and sing and play many games. Such are the children who will soon present themselves in thousands at the Junior Schools’ doors. What is to be done with them? I want to point out, first of all, that the elementary school teachers’ work will be changed by this sudden uprush of clean and strong young life from below. Either the Nursery-School will be a paltry thing, that is to say a new failure, or else it will soon influence not only elementary schools but also the secondary. It will provide a new kind of children to be educated, and this must react sooner or later, not only on all the schools, but on all our social life, on the kind of government and laws framed for the people, and on the relation of our nation to other nations. I do not think these claims exaggerated. The nursery-school, if it became universal, could, in one generation, remove the profound differences in education which at present divide the classes, could produce a population all enjoying the mental and physical development which is now confined to the most fortunate, and could remove the terrible dead-weight of disease and stupidity and malevolence which now makes progress so difficult. Under the Education Act of 1918, nursery-schools were to have been promoted by Government money; but when the Geddes Axe descended it was decided that it was more important to build cruisers and the Singapore Dock for the purpose of facilitating war with the Japanese. At the present moment, the Government is spending a million a year to induce people to poison themselves with preservatives in Canadian butter rather than eat pure butter from Denmark. To secure this end, our children are condemned to disease and misery and unawakened intelligence, from which multitudes could be saved by a million a year spent on nursery-schools. The mothers now have the vote; will they some day learn to use it for the good of their children?[18]