This substitute can be most easily elaborated among groups of children. Somewhere they must learn to carry on an orderly daily life--that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help which is the only real life of civilized man. Play is the great social stimulus, and it is the prime motive which unites children and draws them into comradeship. A true democratic relation and ease of acquaintance is found among the children in a typical factory community because they more readily overcome differences of language, tradition, and religion than do the adults. “It is in play that nature reveals her anxious care to discover men to each other,” and this happy and important task, children unconsciously carry forward day by day with all the excitement and joy of co-ordinate activity. They accomplish that which their elders could not possibly do, and they render a most important service to the community. We have not as yet utilized this joy of association in relation to the system of factory production which is so preëminently one of large bodies of men working together for hours at a time. But there is no doubt that it would bring a new power into modern industry if the factory could avail itself of that _esprit de corps_, that triumphant buoyancy which the child experiences when he feels his complete identification with a social group; that sense of security which comes upon him sitting in a theatre or “at a party,” when he issues forth from himself and is lost in a fairyland which has been evoked not only by his own imagination, but by that of his companions as well. This power of association, of assimilation, which children possess in such a high degree, is easily carried over into the affairs of youth if it but be given opportunity and freedom for action, as it is in the college life of more favored young people. The _esprit de corps_ of an athletic team, that astonishing force of co-operation, is, however, never consciously carried over into industry, but is persistently disregarded. It is, indeed, lost before it is discovered--if I may be permitted an Irish bull--in the case of children who are put to work before they have had time to develop the power beyond its most childish and haphazard manifestations. Factory life depends upon groups of people working together, and yet it is content with the morphology of the group, as it were, paying no attention to its psychology, to the interaction of its members. By regarding each producer as a solitary unit, a tremendous power is totally unutilized. In the case of children who are prematurely put to work under such conditions, an unwarranted nervous strain is added as they make their effort to stand up to the individual duties of life while still in the stage of group and family dependence.