The simple hospitable homely pleasures that have now been superseded by children's parties, lesson drudgery, and by parents living outside of the home must come back again if what is bad now is not to become worse. Evil is not to be expelled by evil; it is to be overcome by good. If the home is not to be again sunny, quiet, simple, and lively, mothers may go out as much as they like to discuss education and morality in the evening. There will be no real change. Mothers must seriously perceive that no social activity has greater significance than education, and that in this nothing can replace their own appropriate influence in a home. They must make up their minds to real reform, such reforms as those introduced by a lady in Stockholm; burdened though she was with social engagements and public obligations, she refused to accept any invitation except on one day of the week, in order to spend her evenings quietly with her children. How long will the majority of mothers sacrifice children to the eternal ennui and vacuity of our modern social and club life? There is no intention here to recommend that social life and public activities shall be deprived of the influence of experienced and thinking mothers. But I only wish to point to the cases of overstrain now caused by the stress of excessive sociability and outside activity. This kind of over-exertion, more especially, injures the home through the mother. In our day as in all other periods, be our opinions in other respects what they may, pagan, Christian, Jewish, or free thinking, a good home is only created by those parents who have a religious reverence for the holiness of the home. CHAPTER V SOUL MURDER IN THE SCHOOLS Any one who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. The latter finds an impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mistakes, where each point is open to attack, but where each attack fails because of the inadequate means at the reformer's command. The modern school has succeeded in doing something which, according to the law of physics, is impossible: the annihilation of once existent matter. The desire for knowledge, the capacity for acting by oneself, the gift of observation, all qualities children bring with them to school, have, as a rule, at the close of the school period disappeared. They have not been transformed into actual knowledge or interests. This is the result of children spending almost the whole of their life from the sixth to the eighteenth year at the school desk, hour by hour, month by month, term by term; taking doses of knowledge, first in teaspoonfuls, then in dessert-spoonfuls, and finally in tablespoonfuls, absorbing mixtures which the teacher often has compounded from fourth- or fifth-hand recipes.