One summer the writer went from a two weeks’ residence in East London, where she had become sick and bewildered by the sights and sounds encountered there, directly to Switzerland.  She found the beaten routes of travel filled with young English men and women who could walk many miles a day, and who could climb peaks so inaccessible that the feats received honorable mention in Alpine journals,—­a result which filled their families with joy and pride.  These young people knew to a nicety the proper diet and clothing which would best contribute toward endurance.  Everything was very fine about them save their motive power.  The writer does not refer to the hard-worked men and women who were taking a vacation, but to the leisured young people, to whom this period was the most serious of the year, and filled with the most strenuous exertion.  They did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it, for we are too complicated to be content with mere exercise.  Civilization has bound us too closely with our brethren for any one of us to be long happy in the cultivation of mere individual force or in the accumulation of mere muscular energy.

With Whitechapel constantly in mind, it was difficult not to advise these young people to use some of this muscular energy of which they were so proud, in cleaning neglected alleys and paving soggy streets.  Their stores of enthusiasm might stir to energy the listless men and women of East London and utilize latent social forces.  The exercise would be quite as good, the need of endurance as great, the care for proper dress and food as important; but the motives for action would be turned from selfish ones into social ones.  Such an appeal would doubtless be met with a certain response from the young people, but would never be countenanced by their families for an instant.

Fortunately a beginning has been made in another direction, and a few parents have already begun to consider even their little children in relation to society as well as to the family.  The young mothers who attend “Child Study” classes have a larger notion of parenthood and expect given characteristics from their children, at certain ages and under certain conditions.  They quite calmly watch the various attempts of a child to assert his individuality, which so often takes the form of opposition to the wishes of the family and to the rule of the household.  They recognize as acting under the same law of development the little child of three who persistently runs away and pretends not to hear his mother’s voice, the boy of ten who violently, although temporarily, resents control of any sort, and the grown-up son who, by an individualized and trained personality, is drawn into pursuits and interests quite alien to those of his family.