years of age to make a rag doll, that by its weight
and size really gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much joy on
its young mother, I began to think about the education of my future
children. Then as now my educational ideal was that the children
should be happy, that they should not fear. Fear is the misfortune of
childhood, and the sufferings of the child come from the half-realised
opposition between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way
in which these possibilities are actually handled. It may be said that
life, at every stage, is cruel in its treatment of our possibilities of
happiness. But the difference between the sufferings of the adult
from existence, and the sufferings of the child caused by adults, is
tremendous. The child is unwilling to resign himself to the sufferings
imposed upon him by adults and the more impatient the child is against
unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more certainly will
he some day be driven to find means to transform for himself and for
others the hard necessities of life.

A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition into
child's nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence for it, wrote as
follows: "Where we behold children we suspect there are princes, but as
to the kings, where are they?" Not only life's tragic elements diminish
and dam up its vital energies. Equally destructive is a parent's want
of reverence for the sources of life which meet them in a new being.
Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted
nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is only
another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that
it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and
history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they
have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as
they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars.

The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in
the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like
white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father
should see in his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with
his own best powers, and then the child will come to his own; not to the
right of asking others to become the plaything of his caprices but to
the right of living his full strong personal child's life along w