For the present every individual educator must _set these laws over himself_; must sedulously create counter influences to cope with the destructive influences which great cities, especially, exert upon children.[12] The new mothers lead children out into nature and endeavour to satisfy their zeal for activity by appropriate tasks as well as to encourage by suitable means their love of invention and their impulse for play. In the country children provide much for themselves. But what both city and country children need is a mother familiar with nature, who can answer the questions which the child is by his own observations prompted to ask; and the number of such mothers is continually increasing. Both city and country children need also a mother who can tell stories. Just as the settlement gardens most clearly demonstrate how sundered the working people of the great cities are from nature, so the “story evenings,” which are now established for children, show how far children have been permitted to stray from the mother, who formerly gathered them about her for the hour of story, play, and song. What, finally, children need is the mother’s delicate revelation of the sexual “mystery,” which often early exercises the thoughts of the child and in which he should be initiated quietly and gradually by the mother. All the educational influences here outlined emanate not only from the enlightened, exceptional mother; they are exercised by the average mother of to-day to better advantage than by the spiritually significant mother of fifty years ago. And they are _quite as essential_, in order that the highest possibility within the reach of each may be attained, in the education of the genius as in that of the ordinary child. Such influences in like degree strengthen the innate bent of the genius and raise the average, from generation to generation, to a level where man can live according to higher standards than those of the present time. The new mothers understand that for the utilisation of all these opportunities that make their appearance in the first seven years of the child’s life, their motherly tenderness, gentleness, and patience do not suffice; that they need in addition all the intelligence, imagination, fine feeling, scientific methods of observation, ethical and æsthetic culture and other spiritual acquisitions they possess, as direct and indirect fruits of the woman movement.