“ATTENTION” 303 CHAPTER III AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT 312 CHAPTER IV DOROTHY ELMORE’S ACHIEVEMENT: A FORECAST 320 CHAPTER V CONSEQUENCES 346 CHAPTER VI MRS. SEDLEY’S TALE 355 CHAPTER VII ABILITY 367 CHAPTER VIII POOR MRS. JUMEAU! 376 CHAPTER IX “A HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU!” 386 CHAPTER X PARENTS IN COUNCIL (PART I) 395 CHAPTER XI PARENTS IN COUNCIL (PART II) 405 CHAPTER XII A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER 413 NOTE 429 BOOK I _THEORY_ PARENTS AND CHILDREN CHAPTER I _THE FAMILY_ “The family is the unit of the nation.”--F. D. MAURICE. It is probable that no other educational thinker has succeeded in affecting parents so profoundly as did Rousseau. _Emile_ is little read now, but how many current theories of the regimen proper for children have there their unsuspected source? Everybody knows--and his contemporaries knew it better than we--that Jean Jacques Rousseau had not enough sterling character to warrant him to pose as an authority on any subject, least of all on that of education. He sets himself down a poor thing, and we see no cause to reject the evidence of his _Confessions_. We are not carried away by the charm of his style; his “forcible feebleness” does not dazzle us. No man can _say_ beyond that which he _is_, and there is a want of grit in his philosophic theories that removes most of them from the category of available thought.