The child’s splendid, unconscious happiness is in making others happy; in being answered by the smiles it produces; in showing outbursts of affection and receiving affection in return; in feeling the security and pride of itself owning and belonging to its father or mother; in allowing this delight to show itself in play and caresses and being met with the same delight without its being empty. For in a home, where some seriousness prevails, a child soon learns that affection also means work and sacrifice for others. From such affection the psychically personal tie of blood is formed, while the “natural” one grows weak, as it is not renewed by the apparently unimportant daily, hourly influence of the intangible, invisible things, through which, as even the _Edda_ tells us, the indestructible ties are formed. In a word, the home of one’s childhood is for the development of human feelings, what one’s native place is for the development of patriotism. Even now home-life suffers in a disquieting degree from the school’s increasing grasp of the older children; from the indifference to and disconnection from the home which occurs when it sees the children only at meal-times, on Sundays, and during the holidays. But if even the little children were to be placed in the same situation, then this evil would be extended to the most decisive years of their lives. To turn now from parents and children to the new foster-mothers of the town and country nurseries, how is it intended that these shall suffice for their own children, if they are mothers, how—if they are motherly—are they to content themselves with the children of others, which they will furthermore be compelled to lose over and over again? Have the women who want to be “freed” ever given a thought to the sufferings of these others?