burden his childhood with a training which will be largely useless. So much of our energy is wasted, and so much friction created, because we are unwilling to trust life. If life is the great demoralizer, it is also the great moralizer. It whips us into shape, and saddles us with responsibilities and the means of meeting them, with obligations and the will to meet them, with burdens and a strength to bear them. It creates in us a conscience and the love of duty, and endows us with a morality that a mother and father with the power and the love of angels working through all the years of our childhood could not have created within us. Trust life and not your own feeble efforts to create the soul in the child! The virtue of childhood, then, is an exhaustless curiosity and interest in the world in which the child finds himself. He is here to learn his way around in it, to learn the names of things and their uses, how to use his body and his capacities. This will be the most excellent working of his soul. If his mind and body are active, he will be a “good” child, in the best sense of the word. We can almost afford to let him be insolent and irreverent and troublesome as long as he is only curious. If he has a temper, it will not be cured by curbing, but by either letting it burn out, or not giving it fuel to feed on. Food for his body and facts for his mind are the sustenance he requires. From the food will be built up his body, and from the facts and his reactions to them will slowly evolve his world of values and ideals. We cannot aid him by giving him our theories, or shorten the path for him by presenting him with ready-made standards. In spite of all the moral teachers, there is no short cut to the moral life of youth, any more than there is a royal road to knowledge. Nor can we help him to grow by transferring some of our superfluous moral flesh to his bones. The child’s qualities which shock our sense of propriety are evidences not of his immorality, but of his pre-morality. A morality that will mean anything to him can only be built up out of a vast store of experience, and only when his world has broadened out into a real society with influences of every kind coming from every side. He cannot get the relish of right and wrong until he has tasted life, and it is the taste of life that the child does not have. That taste comes only with youth, and then with a bewildering complexity and vividness.