This careful attention in early days appears of capital importance, because then or never is the time to root up any little weeds one by one as they appear. No strenuous effort is needed; it is work to be done by a woman’s hand, gently. Hitherto it had been imagined that the first thing needful was to secure a maximum of physical strength, and consequently to harden a child by means almost cruel, such as an exemplary self-repression, a life in the open air, freely exposed to all inclemencies of the weather. If a child wept he was allowed to weep. He was taken sometimes to church, or to see very near relatives, but never to places of amusement, to the theatre, or to the houses of the wealthy. To become ever so little accustomed to comfort, idleness, or an artificial life was considered fatal. People feared to make a mollycoddle of him, and said to themselves that the army and the gymnasium in later years would never eradicate ill habits formed in childhood. They thought only of the children; the mothers were left out of account. The women regarded this system as much too severe, and one of the first results of their influence was its modification. Why martyr the children under pretext of hardening them? What was the good of exposing them half naked to the cold, or of making little monks of them, and assuming towards them the airs of a policeman? Was it so great a crime to show these poor little creatures some affection, to admit them to some share with their elders in the life they were bound to know, to form their minds and their manners by allowing them a place at the card table, or to give them companions—even at the cost of a black eye? The old moralists regarded such proceedings as premature and far too unsystematic, and refused to hear of anything but muscle, maintaining that entrance into the world always came soon enough. Women were to divert education into another channel. When they come to gain greater power in the home, we shall find them demanding the right to love their children, enter into their concerns, live with them, take pleasure in them, at least until they attain the classic age of seven. THE BOYS.