but we have applied the principle in many directions. It is, indeed, hardly possible to get beyond the ground covered by this so simple sounding axiom: that is, it is hardly within our power to overstate the possibilities of education. _Anything_ may be made of a child by those who first get him into their hands. No doubt, propagandism becomes the immediate duty of any who have perceived a saving principle for the race. And efforts were made in many directions to bring before parents of all classes the notion that the formation of habits is among the chief aims of education. Our host’s EVENT is one of these efforts, and the Parents’ Club spread like wildfire; every one was ready for it, because people were beginning to feel the wretched uncertainty of the casual method. How is it, they asked, that, bring up two boys in the same way, and one turns out a villain, the other, a credit to his family? Now, the ‘New Education’ deals entirely with individuals; not with children, but with the child; the faulty habit is supplanted, observe the word, the desirable habit produced, within a definite period, say a month or so, and then the parents’ easy work is to keep the child upon the lines of habit thus produced.” “Now, stop a minute, Doctor, stop a minute! I’m afraid I’m about to lose my easily won laurels. You, who are a classical scholar, must know how familiar to the mind both of Roman and Greek was this doctrine of habit. Again, a poet of our own, an eighteenth-century man--wasn’t he Dryden?--expresses capitally the time-out-of-mind English feeling on this subject-- “‘Children, like tender osiers, take the bow, And, as they first are fashion’d, always grow; For what we learn in youth, to that alone In age we are by second nature prone.’” “Most happy; but don’t you see, Dr. Oldcastle, I began by admitting that people have always had a notion that they must bring up their children in good habits, and suppress faulty ones. But now, they have something more than a notion; they have scientific certainty. And, instead of dawdling through the whole period of childhood with spasmodic efforts to get a boy to tie his shoe-strings fast, they take it in hand once and for all, keep incessant watch for the week or two it will take to form the habit, and then the thing is done with for a lifetime. The new habit once formed, the parent’s part is no more than to watch against chance returns to the old ways until the habit is ingrained in the stuff of the child’s character. Now, don’t you see that this is a very different thing from the desultory way in which a child was allowed to try off and on for a habit all his days, and never got it?”