In these days, perhaps it is hardly necessary to accentuate baby’s other rights since the century of the child dawned a generation ago. To-day it is perhaps almost more important to accentuate the rights of others who exist in the neighbourhood of a baby. But on the other hand if one looks penetratingly at the whole problem of character development, one sees that among baby’s rights is its right to be trained from the very first so that its life shall be as little hindered by friction as may be possible: that it should be taught the elementary rules of conduct and necessary conformity with the hard material facts of existence from the very first. A wise nurse’s or mother’s training from the earliest weeks of infancy may make or mar a future man’s or woman’s chance of getting on in the world and making a success of their lives, by making or marring the character, the capacity to obey, the formation of regular and hygienic habits and the realization of the physical facts of the world. The ancient Greeks taught their youth to reverence that which was beneath them, that which was around them, and that which was above them. In my opinion this right of youth to be placed in its proper orientation in relation to the world has been neglected of late. We are suffering from the wayward revolt from an earlier and perhaps harsher type of mistake, that of too greatly controlling and thwarting the child’s impulses. We must maintain a just balance and return to the due mean in which the right of a child, not only to be well born but well trained, is universally recognized. CHAPTER XVIII The Weakest Link in the Human Chain “This shall be thy reward--that the ideal shall be real to thee.” OLIVE SCHREINER: _Dreams_. Proverbs innumerable and daily experience have familiarized every one with the idea that the citizen is moulded and his or her essential characteristics determined in childhood, and as a result of childhood’s training. The most profoundly operative of all his qualities is his potential sex attitude, because it is that which determines his experience of sex and marriage, which colours his thoughts towards women throughout his life, which inclines his mind nobly towards his own racial actions or which leaves him weak and frivolous in his attitude towards the greatest profundities of life. Children, otherwise brought up with every care and forethought, surrounded by all that love and money can give them, are too generally left, without their mother’s guidance or their father’s wisdom, to discover the great facts of life partly by instinct and partly from the vulgar talk of servants or soiled children a little older than themselves. Worse even than this takes place, because most generally in this connection they not only do not hear the truth from their mother’s lips, but they learn from her their most influential and earliest lesson in lying.