ot only help on, but create the pressure to which teachers yield, and
children are sacrificed. The whole responsibility is really theirs. They
have in their hands the power to regulate the whole school routine to
which their children are to be subjected. This is plain, when we once
consider what would be the immediate effect in any community, large or
small, if a majority of parents took action together, and persistently
refused to allow any child under fourteen to be confined in school more
than four hours out of the twenty-four, more than one hour at a time, or
to do more than five hours' brain-work in a day. The law of supply and
demand is a first principle. In three months the schools in that community
would be entirely reorganized, to accord with the parents' wishes; in
three years the improved average health of the children in that community
would bear its own witness in ruddy bloom along the streets; and perhaps
even in one generation so great gain of vigor might be made that the
melancholy statistics of burial would no longer have to record the death
under twelve years of age of more than two-fifths of the children who are
born.

The Awkward Age.

The expression defines itself. At the first sound of the words, we all
think of some one unhappy soul we know just now, whom they suggest. Nobody
is ever without at least one brother, sister, cousin, or friend on hand,
who is struggling through this social slough of despond; and nobody ever
will be, so long as the world goes on taking it for granted that the
slough is a necessity, and that the road must go through it. Nature never
meant any such thing. Now and then she blunders or gets thwarted of her
intent, and turns out a person who is awkward, hopelessly and forever
awkward; body and soul are clumsy together, and it is hard to fancy them
translated to the spiritual world without too much elbow and ankle.
However, these are rare cases, and come in under the law of variation. But
an awkward age,--a necessary crisis or stage of uncouthness, through which
all human beings must pass,--Nature was incapable of such a conception;
law has no place for it; development does not know it; instinct revolts
from it; and man is the only animal who has been silly and wrong-headed
enough to stumble into it. The explanation and the remedy are so simple,
so close at hand, that we have not seen them. The whole thing lies in a
nutshell. Where does this abnormal, uncomfortable