the congested quarters of a great city. But the need
thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the
United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or
substitute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along
the way of life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have
a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in
dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The
housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable
living-place into which to put every home.

=Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The
fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to
teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All
these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They
are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health
and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from
the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of
talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward
that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and
understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for
the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can
understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and
other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's
language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art.

In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most
beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the
fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to
welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the
practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the
family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are
several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is
often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all
to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through
childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but
the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious
absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts.
Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or
unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his