when speaking to older people.  Listen to a party of nurses in the Park addressing their charges.  As if they knew that their commands have small chance of being obeyed, they shout them with incisive force.  “Come along at once when I tell you,” they say.  And the child faithfully reflects it all back, and is heard ordering his little sister about like a drill sergeant, or curtly bidding his grandmother change her seat to suit his pleasure.  If we are to have pretty phrases and tones of voice, mothers must see to it that the child habitually hears no other.  Again, mothers will complain that their child is deaf, or, at any rate, that he has the bad habit of responding to all remarks addressed to him by saying, “What?” or, worse still, “Eh?” Often enough the reason that he does so is not that the child is deaf, nor that he is particularly slow to understand, but simply that he himself speaks so indistinctly that no matter what he says to the grown-up people around him, they bend over him and themselves utter the objectionable word.

We all hate the tell-tale child, and when a boy comes in from his walk and has much to say of the wicked behaviour of his little sister on the afternoon’s outing, his mother is apt to see in this a most horrid tendency towards tale-bearing and currying of favour.  She does not realise that day by day, when the children have come in from their walk, she has asked nurse in their hearing if they have been good children; and when, as often happens, they have not, the nurse has duly recounted their shortcomings, with the laudable notion of putting them to shame, and of emphasising to them the wickedness of their backsliding—­and this son of hers is no hypocrite, but speaks only, as all children speak, in faithful reproduction of all that he hears.  Those grown-up persons who are in charge of the children must realise that the child’s vocabulary is their vocabulary, not his own.  It is unfortunate, but I think not unavoidable, that so often almost the earliest words that the infant learns to speak are words of reproof, or chiding, or repression.  The baby scolds himself with gusto, uttering reproof in the very tone of his elders:  “No, no,” “Naughty,” or “Dirty,” or “Baby shocked.”

Speech, then, is imitative from the first, if we except the early baby sounds with reduplication of consonants to which in course of time definite meaning becomes attached, as “Ba-ba,” “Ma-ma,” “Na-na,” “Ta-ta,” and so forth.  Action only becomes imitative at a somewhat later stage.  The first purposive movements of the child’s limbs are carried out in order to evoke tactile sensations.  He delights to stimulate and develop the sense of touch.  At first he has no knowledge of distance, and his reach exceeds his grasp.  He will strain to touch and hold distant objects.  Gradually he learns the limitations of space, and will pick up and hold an object in his hand with precision.  Often he conveys everything to his mouth, not because