title which, literally translated, ran "Institution
for the Care of Little Children."

[Footnote 1: Froebel's _Letters_, trans. Michaelis and Moore, p. 30.]

In England the word Nursery, which implies the idea of nurture, belongs
properly to children, though it has been borrowed by the gardener for
his young plants. In Germany it was the other way round; Froebel had to
invent the term _child garden_ to express his idea of the nurture, as
opposed to the repression, of the essential nature of the child.
Unfortunately the word Kindergarten while being naturalised in England
had two distinct meanings attached to it. Well-to-do people began to
send their children to a new institution, a child garden or play school.
The children of the people, however, already attended Infant Schools,
of which the chief feature was what Mr. Caldwell Cook calls
"sit-stillery," and here the word Kindergarten, really equivalent to
Nursery School, became identified with certain occupations, childlike in
origin it is true, but formalised out of all recognition. How a real
Kindergarten strikes a child is illustrated by the recent remark from a
little new boy who had been with us for perhaps three mornings. "Shall I
go up to the nursery now?" he asked.

The first attempt at a Kindergarten was made in 1837, and by 1848
Germany possessed sixteen. In that eventful year came the revolution in
Berlin, which created such high hopes, doomed, alas! to disappointment.
"Instead of the rosy dawn of freedom," writes Ebers,[2] himself an old
Keilhau boy, "in the State the exercise of a boundless arbitrary power,
in the Church dark intolerance." It must have been an easy matter to
bring charges of revolutionary doctrines against the man who said so
innocently, "But I,--I only wanted to train up free-thinking,
independent men."

[Footnote 2: Author of _An Egyptian Princess_, etc.]

It was from "stony Berlin," as Froebel calls it, that the edict went
forth in the name of the Minister of Education entirely prohibiting
Kindergartens in Prussia, and the prohibition soon spread. At the
present time it seems to us quite fitting that the bitter attack upon
Kindergartens should have been launched by Folsung, a schoolmaster, "who
began life as an artilleryman." Nor is it less interesting to read that
it was under the protection of Von Moltke himself that Oberlin schools
were opened to counteract the attractions of the "godless" Kindergarten.

Little wonder that the