I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in the expert child-trainer. I have found always that they regard the child, mainly, if not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a definite plan. The expert is never human, and the child has need of all the human element that it can get. It has absolute need of a mother and of a father. And it is impossible to be parents in the complete and right sense apart from the individual home. All experience shows us that the home, with its sympathetic relationships of mutual affection, cannot be replaced. We must insist on conditions of society that will make home life possible. The child has to accept the arrangements we make as a sacred thing, that is why this question is of such immense importance. If the matter could be fixed by the will of children, I should have no fear. The child has not lost the true values of life. We have grown careless of the home under the blighting effects of industrialism. And the problem of the child is much more difficult in the case of modern mothers, who have few children and no strong traditions—no fixed standard of child training and of home life. Each mother is continually making personal experiments, a course of conduct that is not only harmful to the individual child, but one that must lead to collective confusion. Under such conditions excessive ardour may be as dangerous as neglect. One of the most unfortunate children I have known was an idolised only child with most conscientious modern parents, who kept a record in many large volumes of its every act and every saying. This child was trained out of childhood. There may be too much care and attention given by the parents as well as too little. Motherhood in theory much praised, poetised, and hailed as a wonderful thing, often in actual expression is the strongest deterrent influence in the life of the child. The mother cannot realise the young life that has come from her life apart from herself. The child is too near to her. And it follows from this that her instinct and her love are not primarily concerned with the child, rather she is interested in it chiefly as its mother, that is, the birth-giver and possessor of the child. Most mothers bind their children to them much too closely with an egoistic love which is the most poisonous form of selfishness. Therefore the mother often is the real enemy in the home, the most self-centred and conservative member.