“To this day,” says an American author,[22] “the old tingling pain burns my cheeks as I recall certain rude and contemptuous words which were said to me when I was very young, and stamped on my memory for ever. I was once called ‘a stupid child’ in the presence of strangers. I had brought the wrong book from my father’s study. Nothing could be said to me to-day which would give me a tenth part of the hopeless sense of degradation which came from those words. Another time, on the arrival of an unexpected guest to dinner, I was sent, in a great hurry, away from the table to make room, with the remark that ‘it was not of the least consequence about the child; she could just as well have her dinner afterward.’ ‘The child’ would have been only too happy to help in the hospitality of the sudden emergency if the thing had been differently put; but the sting of having it put that way I never forgot. Yet, in both these instances, the rudeness was so small in comparison with what we habitually see that it would be too trivial to mention, except for the bearing of the fact that the pain it gave has lasted until now.” “What, is it severity in these maudlin days to call a child ‘stupid’? A pretty idiot he’ll make of himself when the world comes to bandy names with him if he’s to be brought up on nothing but the butter and honey of soft speeches.” This is a discordant protest, not at all in harmony with the notions of perfect child-living with which we are amusing ourselves in these days; but we cannot afford to turn a deaf ear to it. “Don’t make a fool of the child,” was the warning young mothers used to get from their elders. But we have changed all that, and a child’s paradise must be prepared for the little feet to walk in. “He’s so happy at school,” we are told, and we ask no more. We have reversed the old order; it used to be, “If he’s good, he will be happy;” now we say, “If he’s happy, he will be good.” Goodness and happiness are regarded as convertible terms, only we like best to put “happy” as the cause, and “good” as the consequent. And the child brought up on these lines is both happy and good without much moral effort of self-compelling on his own part, while our care is to surround him with happy-making circumstances until he has got into the trick, as it were, of being good.