nactment that children should commence any process of
instruction at the tender age of five should be at once struck off the
statute-book. No doubt something would have to be done to remove young
children of the poorest class, in large towns at least, from the
influence of sordid homes for a certain period of the day. It does not
follow, however, that they should be subjected to the routine of an
elementary school and crammed with superficial and unsuitable knowledge.

Children want room to think; their minds have to grow up as well as
their bodies. Mental nourishment is quite as necessary as physical
nourishment; but it is nonsensical to apply them both in the same
fashion. The mind has to be fed in a totally different manner to the
body. The former is a delicate operation, that requires far more care
and common sense than is necessary for the boiling of milk or the
preparation of an infant food.

The child's mind is not a blank, upon which anything may be written at
will; it is scored invisibly with heredity and individual tendencies.
The function of the parent is to see that nothing is done to destroy
this delicate fabric, and to watch carefully for revelations of natural
bent and character, in order to encourage and develop them.

Anything in the shape of actual teaching or instruction ought to be
rigorously avoided. Facts should be regarded as poisons, to be used
sparingly and with discrimination. Every time that a fact is imparted an
idea is driven out. That should be carefully borne in mind. The
operation of the simplest fact upon the intelligence is highly complex.
It is not only a thing to imprint upon the memory, but it is also a
means of diverting thought into the channels of the commonplace. Every
fact closes up an avenue of the imagination.

To take an illustration, let us suppose someone to impart to a little
child the information that it is a physiological impossibility for
angels to have wings as well as arms. This prosaic piece of intelligence
would, in one moment, annihilate most of the romance of childhood. It
would be a blow from which the imagination might never recover. The
child would, by a rapid process of thought, lose all faith in fairyland,
and in the thousand and one fancies of the youthful brain that are the
mainspring of the development of the imagination.

Why is it that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred lose this faculty in
the earliest period of their childhood? It is simply becau