The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own attitude. Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new, self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them. Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he will have to live some day. § 2. FIGHTING The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys' fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good to find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot, nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle their differences as honestly at least as do men. Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.