to the furniture in his home, but far better marred furniture than marred childhood.  If, at this age, he should become as quiet and sedate as his father, his parents and teacher would have cause for alarm.  It is the high privilege of the parent and the teacher to direct his activities, but not to abridge or interdict them.  If the teacher would reduce him to inaction and silence, she may well reflect that if he were an imbecile he would be quiet.  He will not pass this way again; and if he is ever to have the sort of life that is in harmony with his age, he must have it now.

=Childhood curtailed.=—­He has a right, also, to the full measure of childhood.  This period is relatively short, and any curtailment does violence to his physiological and psychological nature.  All the years of his childhood are necessary for a proper balancing of his physical and mental powers, that they may do their appointed work in after years.  Entire volumes have been devoted to this subject, but, in spite of these volumes, some mothers still try to hurry their daughters into the duties and responsibilities of adult life.  One such mother went to the high school to get the books of her fifteen-year-old daughter and, upon being asked why the daughter was leaving school, replied, “Oh, she’s keeping company now.”  That daughter will never be the hardy plant in civilization that she ought to be, because she was reared in a hothouse atmosphere.  That mother had no right to cripple the life of her child by thwarting nature’s decrees.

=Detrimental effects.=—­The pity of it all is that the child is at the mercy of the parent, or of the teacher, as the case may be.  We become so eager to have “old heads on young shoulders” that we begrudge the child the years that are necessary for the shoulders to attain that maturity of strength that is needful for supporting the “old heads.”  Then ensues a lack of balance, and, were all children thus denied their right to the full period of youth, we should have a distorted civilization.  Dickens inveighs against this curtailment of youth prodigiously, and the marvel is that we have failed to learn the lesson from his pages.  We need not have recourse to Victor Hugo to know the life of little Cosette, for we can see her prototype by merely looking about us.

=The child’s right to the best.=—­As the child has a right to life in its fullness, so he has a right to all the agencies that can promote this type of life.  If he meets with an accident he has a right to the best surgical skill that can be secured, and this right we readily concede; and equally he has a right to the best teacher that money will secure.  If he has a teacher that is less than the best, the time thus lost can never be restored to him.  A lady who had an unskillful teacher in her first year in the high school now avers that he maimed her for life in that particular study.  Life is such a delicate affair that it demands expert handling.  If we hope to have the child attain his right to be an intelligent cooeperating agent in promoting life in society, then no price is too great to pay for the expert teaching which will nurture the sort of life in him that will make him effective.