om which nourishes and gives well-being to our life, even
in its most minute acts. Of this it was said: "Man does not live by
bread alone." How much greater this need must be in young children, in
whom creation is still in action!

With strife and rebellion they have to defend their own little
conquests of their environment. When they want to exercise their
senses, such as that of touch, for instance, every one condemns them:
"Do not touch!" If they attempt to take something from the kitchen,
some scraps to make a little dish, they are driven away, and
mercilessly sent back to their toys. How often one of those marvelous
moments when their attention is fixed, and that process of
organization which is to develop them begins in their souls, is
roughly interrupted; moments when the spontaneous efforts of the young
child are groping blindly in its surroundings after sustenance for its
intelligence. Do we not all retain an impression of something having
been forever stifled in our lives?

Without being able to give any definite reason, we feel that something
precious was lost on our life-journey, that we were defrauded and
depreciated. Perhaps at the very moments when we were about to create
ourselves, we were interrupted and persecuted, and our spiritual
organism was left rickety, weak, and inadequate.

Let us imagine to ourselves certain adults, not mature and stable like
the majority of grown men, but in a state of spiritual auto-creation,
as are men of genius. Let us take the case of a writer under the
influence of poetic inspiration, at the moment when his beneficent and
inspiring work is about to take form for the help of other men. Or
that of the mathematician who perceives the solution of a great
problem, from which will issue new principles beneficial to all
humanity. Or again, that of an artist, whose mind has just conceived
the ideal image which it is necessary to fix upon the canvas lest a
masterpiece be lost to the world. Imagine these men at such
psychological moments, broken in upon by some brutal person shouting
to them to follow him at once, taking them by the hand, or pushing
them out by the shoulders. And for what? The chess-board is set out
for a game. Ah! such men would say, "You could not have done anything
more atrocious! Our inspiration is lost; humanity will be deprived of
a poem, an artistic masterpiece, a useful discovery, by your folly."

But the child in like case does not lose some single pr