I said awhile ago that the new education has had a tendency to make life too soft for children, and to give to their parents the belief that natural instincts alone are safe guides to follow in rearing a child. I hope I shall not seem to be a good old times croaker, sighing for the days when school gardens and folk dancing and glee clubs and dramatization of lessons and beautiful text-books and fascinating handicraft and a hundred other delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making pleasant the paths of learning. Heaven forbid that I should join the ranks of those who carp at a body of citizens who, at an average wage in America less than that of the coal miner and the factory worker, have produced in their schools results little short of the miraculous. To visit, as I have, classrooms of children born in slums across the sea, transplanted to tenements in New York, and to see what our public school teachers are making of these children--the backward, the underfed, the "incorrigible," the blind, the anaemic--well, all I can say is, I do not recommend these visits to Americans of the stripe of that boastful citizen who, being shown the crater of Vesuvius with a "There, you haven't anything like that in America!" disdainfully replied, "Naw, but we've got Niagara, and that'd put the whole blame thing out!" For myself I never feel quite so disposed to brag of my Americanism as when I visit some of our New York schools. And yet, watching the bored shrug of the bright, well-born high school child when one suggests that "The prince and the pauper" is quite as interesting a story as the seventh volume of her latest series, a librarian has some feelings about the lines-of- least-resistance method of educating our youth, which she is glad to find voiced by some of our ablest thinkers. Here is what J. P. Munroe says: "Many of the new methods . . . methods of gentle cooing toward the child's inclinations, of timidly placing a chair for him before a disordered banquet of heterogeneous studies, may produce ladylike persons, but they will not produce men. And when these modern methods go as far as to compel the teacher to divide this intellectual cake and pudding into convenient morsels and to spoon-feed them to the child, partly in obedience to his schoolboy cravings, partly in conformity to a pedagogical psychology, then the result is sure to be mental and moral dyspepsia in a race of milk-sops." How aptly "spoon-fed pudding" characterizes whole cartloads of our current "juveniles"! Listen to President Wilson's opinion: "To be carried along by somebody's suggestions from the time you begin until the time when you are thrust groping and helpless into the world, is the very negation of education. By the nursing process, by the coddling process you are sapping a race; and only loss can possibly result except upon the part of individuals here and there who are so intrinsically strong that you cannot spoil them."