he child. If we confess the truth, we must admit
that we are somewhat like the fine lady who took a superficial
interest in a hospital for poor children, but who kept on declaring:
"If there were to be no more sick children, I should be quite
unhappy." We, too, might say: "If the credulity of children were to
cease, a great pleasure would be taken from our lives."

It is one of the careless errors of our day to arrest artificially a
stage of development for our amusement; as in the ancient courts the
bodily growth of certain victims was arrested to make them dwarfs and
the pastime of the king. Such a statement may seem severe, but it
rests on an actual fact. We are unconscious of it, it is true; yet we
speak of it continually when we say among ourselves with lofty scorn
of the age of immaturity: "Really, we are not children." If we would
refrain from prolonging the child's immaturity in order to be able to
contemplate his inferior state in immobility, and would, on the
contrary, allow free growth admiring the marvels of his progression
ever on the road of higher conquests, we should say of him, with
Christ: "He who would be perfect must become as a little child."

If what is called infant imagination is the product of "immaturity" of
the mind, combined with the poverty in which we leave the child and
the ignorance in which he finds himself, the first thing to do is to
enrich his life by an environment in which he will become the owner of
something, and to enrich his mind by knowledge and experience based on
reality. And having given him these, we must allow him to _mature_ in
_liberty_. It is from freedom of development that we may expect the
manifestations of his imagination.

To enrich the child, who is the poorest among us, because he has
nothing and is the slave of all--this is our first duty towards him.
It will be said: Must we, then, give horses, carriages, and pianos to
all children? By no means. Remedies are never direct when a complex
life is in question. The child who has nothing is the one who dreams
of things the most impossible of attainment. The destitute dream of
millions, the oppressed of a throne. But he who possesses something
attaches himself to that which he possesses to preserve and increase
it reasonably.

A person without employment will dream of becoming a prince; but a
teacher in a school dreams of becoming a head master. Thus the child
who has a "house" of his own, who possesses brooms, ru