of 1065 compared
with the small boy of 1893. When William the Conqueror, with a man's
usual heedlessness of the comfort of small boys, came over in 1066 and
popularised that date, he inaugurated a long succession of useless dates
that the small boy is compelled to learn. Every monarch has had four
figures attached to him, like a picture in an exhibition. Yet was there
ever a man stopped in the streets of London, and suddenly confronted
with the question, "What year did Henry VIII. come to the throne?"
Certainly not. A man would be considered insane who expected any
rational being to burden his mind with such trivialities. Yet the small
boy is caned if he doesn't know. The only consolation I can offer the
unfortunate small boy of to-day is that it will be ever so much worse
for the small boy born 3000 years from now. Every day, objectionable and
thoughtless men are discovering new things. Then dates will keep
accumulating just as they have always been in the habit of doing.
Possibly a new specimen of that detestable type of humanity, Euclid,
will arise, and perhaps some conscienceless villain may invent a more
complicated system of mathematics than algebra. You never can tell what
may happen in 3000 years. So the small boy of 1893 may congratulate
himself that he is not the small boy of 4893.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Mrs. Fenwick Miller thinks it depends upon the parents.]

Childhood ought to be the happiest period of humanity's course; for
children are free from the two great sources of grief and
wretchedness--the struggle for money and the consciousness of sex. The
children of the poor know a want of many comforts, but this is not a
source of unhappiness. Absolute necessities of life, the only true wants
of childhood, are so few, and all that is really needed by anybody apart
from custom or imagination is so cheap, that I do not think that more
than a small minority of children are unhappy from actual want. But we,
their elders, painfully and acutely want a thousand things because we
have tasted them, or because we have imaginations developed to fancy
effectively how we should enjoy them; and then we must needs try to get
them, and make ourselves wretched in the furious effort after satisfying
our desires, and more wretched still because we don't fully succeed. If
we could take life as children in this respect, actively wanting only
absolute necessaries, and not having to ourselves striv