civilised country are withdrawn from the soil and herded into mines and mills and offices, the more imperative is it that the school should quicken rather than deaden the child's innate faculties, should bring sunshine rather than frost into his adolescent life. In such a country as ours the responsibilities of the teacher are only equalled by his opportunities; for the child is in his hands during the most impressionable years of life; and those years will have been wasted, and worse than wasted, unless they have fitted the child to face the world with resourcefulness, intelligence, and vital energy, ready to wrest from his environment, by enlarging and otherwise transforming it, those educative influences which are still to be had for the seeking, but are no longer automatically supplied. _The Moral Aspect of Self-Realisation._ If Man, if each man in turn, is born _good_, the process of growth, or self-realisation, which is presumably taking him towards the perfection of which his nature admits, must needs make him continuously _better_. In other words, growth, provided that it is healthy, harmonious, and many-sided, provided that it is growth of the whole being, is in itself and of inner necessity the most moralising of all processes. Nay, it is the only moralising process, for in no other way can what is naturally good be transformed into what is ideally best. This argument, apart from its being open to the possible objection that it plays on the meaning of the word "good," is perhaps too conclusive to be really convincing. I will therefore try to make my way to its conclusion by another line of thought. The desire to grow, to advance towards maturity, to realise his true self--the self that is his in embryo from the very beginning--is strong in every living thing, and is therefore strong in every child of man. But the desire, which necessarily takes its share in the general process of growth, must needs pass through many stages on its way to its own highest form. In infancy, it is a desire for physical life, for the preservation and expansion of the physical self; and in this stage it is, as I have already pointed out, uncompromisingly selfish. The new-born baby is the incarnation of selfishness; and it is quite right that he should be so. It is his way of trying to realise himself. As the child grows older, the desire to grow becomes a desire for self-aggrandisement,--a desire to shine in various ways, to surpass others, to be admired, to be praised; and though in this stage it may give rise to much vanity and selfishness, still, so long as it has vigorous growth behind it and is in its essence a desire for further growth, it is in the main a healthy tendency, and to call it sinful or vicious would be a misuse of words.