Every generation brings us more close to recognition of this great basic law, finds us more willing to follow nature's principle and bend all our energies to the best development of the child. We early learned to multiply our power and wisdom by transmission through speech, and, applying that process to the child, we taught him what we knew, saving to humanity millennial periods of evolution by this conscious short-cut through education. Nature's way of teaching is a very crude one--mere wholesale capital punishment. She kills off the erring without explanation. They die without knowing what for, and the survivors don't know, either. We, by education, markedly assist nature, transmitting quick knowledge from mouth to mouth, as well as slow tendency from generation to generation. More and more we learn to collect race-improvement and transmit it to the child, the most swift and easy method of social progress. To-day, more than ever before, are our best minds giving attention to this vital problem--how to make better people. How to make better bodies and better minds, better tendencies, better habits, better ideas--this is the study of the modern educator. Slowly we have learned that the best methods of education are more in modifying influence than in transmitted facts; that, as the proverb puts it, "example is better than precept." The modifying influences of social environment have deeper and surer effect on the human race than any others, and that effect is strongest on the young. Therefore, we attach great importance to what we call the "bringing up" of children, and we are right. The education of the little child, through the influences of its early environment, is the most important process of human life. Whatever progress we make in art and science, in manufacture and commerce, is of no permanent importance unless it modifies humanity for the better. That a race of apes should live by agriculture, manufacture, and commerce is inconceivable. They would cease to be apes by so living; but, _if they could_, those processes would be of no value, the product being only apes. We are here to grow, to become a higher and better kind of people. Every process of life is valuable in proportion to its contributing to our improvement, and the process that most contributes to our improvement is the most important of human life. That process is the education of the child, and that education includes all the influences which reach him, the active efforts of parent and teacher, the unconscious influence of all associates, and the passive effect of the physical environment.