bility. How many parents
are able to follow the course of their children's education at school,
and to take them under the arm in their schoolwork at home? Only few.
The mother, who in most such cases has greater leisure at her disposal,
lacks capacity; she has not herself received sufficient training.
Moreover, the method and the courses of education change so frequently
that these are strange to the parents.

Again, the home facilities are generally so poor that the children enjoy
neither the necessary comfort, nor order, nor quiet to do their
schoolwork at home, or to find there the needed aid. Everything
necessary is generally wanting. The home is narrow and overcrowded;
small and grown-up brothers and sisters move about over that narrow
space; the furniture is not what it should be, and furnishes no
facilities to the child for study. Not infrequently light, also air and
heat are wanting; the materials for study and work, if there be any of
them, are poor; frequently even hunger gnaws at the stomach of the child
and robs it of mind and pleasure for its work. As a supplement to this
picture, the fact must be added that hundreds of thousands of children
are put to all manner of work, domestic and industrial, that embitters
their youth and disables them from fulfilling their educational task.
Again, often do children have to overcome the resistance of
narrow-minded parents when they try to take time for their schoolwork or
for play. In short, the obstacles are so numerous that, if they are all
taken into account, the wonder is the youth of the land is as well
educated. It is an evidence of the health of human nature, and of its
inherent ambition after progress and perfection.

Bourgeois society itself recognizes some of these evils by the
introduction of public education and by facilitating the same still more
through the free supply, here and there, of school material--two things
that, as late as about the year 1885 the then Minister of Education of
Saxony designated as a "Social Democratic demand," and as such flung the
designation in the face of the Socialist Representative in the Landtag.
In France, where, after long neglect, popular education advanced so much
more rapidly, progress has gone still further. At least in Paris, the
school children are fed at public expense. The poor obtain food free,
and the children of parents who are better circumstanced contribute
thereto a slight tax toward the common treasury--a