appropriate to that stage, it is much more likely to remain alive in later years, when it can exercise itself in the ways suitable to a man. It is useless to obtrude moral ideas at an age at which they can evoke no response, and at which they are not yet required for the control of behaviour. The only effect is boredom, and imperviousness to those same ideas at the later age when they might have become potent. That is one reason, among others, why the study of child psychology is of such vital importance to education. The games of later years differ from those of early childhood by the fact that they become increasingly competitive. At first, a child’s play is solitary; it is difficult for an infant to join in the games of older brothers and sisters. But collective play, as soon as it becomes possible, is so much more delightful that pleasure in playing alone quickly ceases. English upper-class education has always attributed an enormous moral importance to school games. To my mind, there is some exaggeration in the conventional British view, although I admit that games have certain important merits. They are good for health, provided they are not too expert; if exceptional skill is too much prized the best players overdo it, while the others tend to lapse into spectators. They teach boys and girls to endure hurts without making a fuss, and to incur great fatigue cheerfully. But the other advantages which are claimed for them seem to me largely illusory. They are said to teach co-operation, but in fact they only teach it in its competitive form. This is the form required in war, not in industry or in the right kind of social relations. Science has made it technically possible to substitute co-operation for competition, both in economics and in international politics; at the same time it has made competition (in the form of war) much more dangerous than it used to be. For these reasons, it is more important than in former times to cultivate the idea of co-operative enterprises in which the “enemy” is physical nature, rather than competitive enterprises in which there are human victors and vanquished. I do not want to lay too much stress upon this consideration, because competitiveness is natural to man and must find some outlet, which can hardly be more innocent than games and athletic contests. This is a valid reason for not preventing games, but it is not a valid reason for exalting them into a leading position in the school curriculum. Let boys play because they like to do so, not because the authorities think games an antidote to what the Japanese call “dangerous thoughts”.