What is there in the presence of children in a house to alarm the owner? "They are so destructive," he will tell you; "they are mischievous, they are noisy. Other tenants object to them. They injure the house when old enough to run about, and squall objectionably when babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source of distress to their immediate neighbours because of their painful wailing, and most little children continue to cause distress by their noise in play and shrieks under punishment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the poor baby suffer by night and day; must the small child bang and yell, and must it be punished so frequently? Why is the process of getting acclimated to the world so difficult and agonising? Is there really no way that the experience of all the ages may be turned to account to facilitate the first years of a child's life? Our behaviour to the child rests on several assumptions which are, at least, not proven. We assume that he has to be sick. We assume that he has to be naughty. We assume that life is hard and unpleasant, anyway, and that, the sooner he learns this and gets broken into it, the better. There is no more reason why a child should be sick than a calf or colt. Infancy is tender, and needs care, but it is not a disease. The Egyptian mother loves her baby, no doubt, though it goes blind through her ignorance and neglect--she knows nothing of ophthalmia, and lets the flies crawl over its helpless face, even while she loves it. We scorn and pity her ignorance, but we accept the colic, disorders of teething, and all the train of "preventable diseases" which kill off our babies, precisely as she accepts ophthalmia. We have not learned yet how to make a baby the happy, contented, smoothly developing little animal that he should be. Some of us do better than others, but the knowledge of one is no gain to the rest, being confined to one family. Slowly the wider human care, the larger love, the broader knowledge, of doctor, nurse, and teacher are penetrating the innermost fortress of the home, and teaching the mother how to care for the child. The home did not teach her, and never would. In the untouched homes of ancient Eastern races, countless generations of mothers transmit the same traditional mistakes, love in the same blind way, and weep the same loss as unprofitably as they did ten thousand years ago. In the homes of civilised races, where the light of social progress is most fully felt, we see the most improvement; but even here the pressure of growing knowledge is still combated by the jealous arrogance of the untaught mother, and the measureless inertia of the home.