n; and if he is ever to have the sort of life that is in harmony
with his age, he must have it now.

=Childhood curtailed.=--He has a right, also, to the full measure of
childhood. This period is relatively short, and any curtailment does
violence to his physiological and psychological nature. All the years of
his childhood are necessary for a proper balancing of his physical and
mental powers, that they may do their appointed work in after years.
Entire volumes have been devoted to this subject, but, in spite of these
volumes, some mothers still try to hurry their daughters into the duties
and responsibilities of adult life. One such mother went to the high
school to get the books of her fifteen-year-old daughter and, upon being
asked why the daughter was leaving school, replied, "Oh, she's keeping
company now." That daughter will never be the hardy plant in
civilization that she ought to be, because she was reared in a hothouse
atmosphere. That mother had no right to cripple the life of her child by
thwarting nature's decrees.

=Detrimental effects.=--The pity of it all is that the child is at the
mercy of the parent, or of the teacher, as the case may be. We become so
eager to have "old heads on young shoulders" that we begrudge the child
the years that are necessary for the shoulders to attain that maturity
of strength that is needful for supporting the "old heads." Then ensues
a lack of balance, and, were all children thus denied their right to the
full period of youth, we should have a distorted civilization. Dickens
inveighs against this curtailment of youth prodigiously, and the marvel
is that we have failed to learn the lesson from his pages. We need not
have recourse to Victor Hugo to know the life of little Cosette, for we
can see her prototype by merely looking about us.

=The child's right to the best.=--As the child has a right to life in
its fullness, so he has a right to all the agencies that can promote
this type of life. If he meets with an accident he has a right to the
best surgical skill that can be secured, and this right we readily
concede; and equally he has a right to the best teacher that money will
secure. If he has a teacher that is less than the best, the time thus
lost can never be restored to him. A lady who had an unskillful teacher
in her first year in the high school now avers that he maimed her for
life in that particular study. Life is such a delicate affair that it
demands expert h