t only is reading good and needful but the right kind of
reading. I sometimes wonder as I look upon cultivated persons handing
their adolescent children sheaves of magazines, cheap, vulgar, nasty. We
cannot expect that our children can for years feed upon the trivial and
ephemeral and then give themselves to things big and worth-while.

In one of his stimulating volumes,[D] Frederic Harrison suggests that
men who are most observant as to the friends they make or the
conversation they share are carelessness itself as to the books to
which they entrust themselves and the printed language with which they
saturate their minds. Are not parents often carelessness itself with
respect to the books to which even very young children are suffered to
entrust themselves? A book's not a book! Some books are vacant, some
are deadening, some are pestilential. Wisely to help children to the
right choice of books, remembering that reading is to be of widest
range and that in reading there are innumerable aptitudes, is to
render one of the most important of services to a child.

The editor of a woman's magazine recently pointed out that in one year
nine thousand eight hundred and forty-six girls wrote to her about
beauty problems, and seventeen hundred and seventy-six asked advice
with respect to other problems, "the throbbing, vital questions that
beset the social and business life of the modern girl." Out of what
kind of homes have come these young women, whose quest is of
complexion-wafers? The figures of the magazine editor are above all
things a _testimonium paupertatis_, intellectual and spiritual, to
multitudes of American homes. What kind of mothers will these young
women make? Do they dream of rearing fine sons and noble daughters, or
will they be satisfied to become child-bearers at best rather than
builders of men and women? But there is something more, and it is more
closely related to our particular problem. It is from the empty, poor,
however rich, homes that bitter protest and heartbreaking revolt will
emerge. For some children are bound in the end to despise the cramping
intellectual and moral poverty of their childhood homes,--whence
conflict takes its rise.

CHAPTER IV

THE ART OF PARENTAL GIVING

Parents must be made to see that the really irrepressible conflicts
are not begun when children are fourteen, sixteen and eighteen but
rather four, six, eight; in other words, are ascribable to causes long
anterio