Whether or no all cases of functional nervous and mental disease are thus rooted in emotional stresses of youth, certainly this is often enough the fact to constitute a serious warning to all who have anything to do with the upbringing of the young. If fears of childhood can persist throughout life and can affect adult development so profoundly as to be causal agents in the production of disease, it is obvious that parents and educators should adopt every means in their power to prevent the growth of unreasonable fears in the little ones in their care. Yet, as matters are to-day, and not least in the home, most children are subject to influences that tend to foster, not inhibit, such fears. In their presence, as was noted on a previous page, parents often discuss accidents, crimes, sensational doings of all sorts; they betray a fretfulness, an anxiety, an unrest, that cannot but react on the sensitive mind of the child, filling it with fears of it knows not what; they even utilise the fear impulse as a means of coercing the child into good behaviour; and, what is perhaps worst of all, many parents intrust their children to ignorant and superstitious nurses, who take a strange pleasure in “scaring them half to death” with tales of demons, ghosts and goblins. Fortunately the majority of people, as a result of later training and experience, or by the exercise of will-power, are able to suppress the fears of childhood; but often only at the cost of great mental torture. Not so long ago I received a letter from a Detroit business man, Mr. John J. Mitchell, that may well be quoted in this connection. He wrote: “As a child, as far back as memory goes, I was ‘afraid of the dark,’ intensely afraid.... At about eleven years of age I got a place in a country store, and perhaps two years later changed to the largest store in town. This concern did a large, old-fashioned country business, buying produce and selling all manner of merchandise in exchange or on credit. This involved the use of two old-time buildings (frame) with three stories each and a cellar under all. Owing to the character of the business and location, there were doors opening to the street and area on each side and rear from every floor, including the cellar, seven or eight in all, and widely apart, besides windows. It was my duty at dusk to see that all these doors were properly closed and barred for the night.... With my childish fear of the dark this daily task was an ordeal—at times a terrible ordeal.