erceiving them; his environment meanwhile is so
constructed as to hide and therefore to encourage his errors, with
Mephistophelean hypocrisy.

* * * * *

=Free movement=.--It is now a hygienic principle universally accepted
that children require movement. Thus, when we speak of "free
children," we generally imply that they are free to move, that is, to
run and jump. No mother nowadays fails to agree with the children's
doctor that her child should go into parks and meadows, and move about
freely in the open air.

When we talk of liberty for children in school, some such conception
of physical liberty as this rises at once in the mind. We imagine the
free child making perilous leaps over the desks, or dashing madly
against the walls; his "liberty of movement" seems necessarily to
imply the idea of "a wide space," and accordingly we suppose that, if
confined to the narrow limits of a room, it would inevitably become a
conflict between violence and obstacles, a disorder incompatible with
discipline and work.

But in the laws of "psychical hygiene," "liberty of movement" is not
limited to a conception so primitive as that of merely "animated
bodily liberty." We might, indeed, say of a puppy or a kitten what we
say of children: that they should be free to run and jump, and that
they should be able to do so, as in fact they often do, in a park or a
field, with and like the children. If, however, we wish to apply the
same conception of motor liberty to our treatment of a bird, we should
make certain arrangements for it; we should place within its reach the
branch of a tree, or crossed sticks which would afford foothold for
its claws, since these are not designed to be spread out on the
ground like the feet of creeping things, but are adapted to gripping a
stick. We know that a bird "left free to move" over a vast,
illimitable plain would be miserable.

How then is it that we never think thus: if it be necessary to prepare
different environments for a bird and a reptile in order to ensure
their liberty of movement, must it not be a mistake to provide the
same form of liberty for our children as that proper to cats and dogs?
Children, indeed, when left to themselves to take exercise, show
impatience, and are prone to quarrel and cry; older children feel it
necessary to invent something whereby they may conceal from themselves
the intolerable boredom and humiliation of walking for walking's sake,
and runnin