Candidly, in what proportion of the real homes of England, as distinct from the home of a fiction-writer, is the life "beautiful"? In what proportion does it not rather present the spectacle of an overburdened mother struggling heroically to live up to her reputation for gentleness under the strain of ill or wayward children and an irritating husband? In what proportion are the beautiful homes of the novel written by spinsters or bachelors, or people who restrict the number of their children, or men whose posthumous biographies do not reveal a very sweet home life? I believe it was Carlyle who originated that fond boast that no nation in the world has a word for "home" like the English. It was certainly Dickens who gave us the most touching pictures of domestic tenderness and happiness. How many mothers of the working and lower middle class do not dread the holidays, when the children threaten to be near them all day? How many are capable of training children? How many do not regard a blow as the supreme moral agency? How many would not welcome the easing of their burden, and the training of their children by experts? And why in the world should mothers be likely to have less affection for their children because they have infinitely less trouble with them, and see them only in their smiling hours? The happiest phase of English home life is, surely, found in those middle-class families which can send the children away to school for four-fifths of the year and welcome them home periodically in the holiday mood. In the vast majority of cases the teacher has to struggle despairingly against the influence of the home and the street; for it is to the street that the mother entrusts the child. A lady (an educational expert) once observed to me that it was remarkable to find the children in Gaelic districts of Scotland speaking the purest English. On the contrary, it was wholly natural, and it points an important pædagogical moral. The children learned English _from their teachers only_; there was no corrupt English dialect in the home or village to undo the teacher's lessons. In other matters besides language the school-lessons are constantly frustrated outside the school.