But how are we recruiting the ranks of the nation from the fresh blood and spirits, the new impulses and passions of childhood? And how does our legion of juvenile infantry compare with the young legions of England, France, Germany, Russia, or Italy? These are grave questions, not to be approached without misgiving, yet not by any means with mistrust, much less with despair. We of course do not propose to try to answer all or any of them now, but must be content with throwing out a few plain thoughts upon the kind of intellectual food we are giving our children, and especially upon the kind of juvenile literature that we ought to encourage. We do not claim for the American child any exemption from the common lot, nor make him out to be above or below the human nature to which he belongs, in common with the children of the Old World. He is a chip of the old block; and that old block is from the old trunk that has been growing for ages, is a great deal older than the father or mother, as old as mankind; and each new comer into the field bears with him some traces or remains of all the traits and dispositions and liabilities that have appeared in the ancestors and become the heritage of the race. Not only the is the American child of the same nature as his European contemporary, but he is born into very much of the same life, the same general circumstances of climate, scenery, morals, and religion, and surely into much of the same nursery talk and juvenile amusement, not excepting books. "Mother Goose" has a nursery catholicity wherever the English language is spoken, that is denied to any other book; and fruitful as America has been and is in children's books, we have not yet apparently added a single one to the first rank of juvenile classics, and have distanced AEsop, Bunyan, De Foe, Edgeworth, and the old fairy story-tellers, as little as we have distanced Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Goethe in the higher imagination.