ds of
children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not,
indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant
readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along
the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself
to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared
service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time
or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal
care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by
the time the baby becomes the child.

If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent
mother, or substitute-mother, has the process to repeat with each
newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of
very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety
and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the
family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for
whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate
home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie
picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush
drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker
Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance
fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained
and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care
of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of
a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had
not made possible before for the field-hands of the South. The people
coming to us from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have
many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that
belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It
may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the
belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack
of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it
may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by
lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need
the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and
teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what
children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may
be impossible in