imp of parsimony will no longer be mistaken for the spirit of economy;
when a woman possessed of ordinary human frailty will no longer be
required to guide, direct, develop, train, help, love, and be patient
with sixty little ones, just beginning to tread the difficult paths of
learning, and each receiving just one sixtieth of what he craves. The
millennium will be close at hand when we cease to expect from girls
just out of the high school what Socrates never attempted, and would
have deemed impossible.

Look at Senator Stanford's famous Palo Alto stock farm. Each colt born
into that favored community is placed in a class of twelve. These
twelve colts are cared for and taught by four or five trained
teachers. No man interested in the training of fine horses ever
objects, so far as I know, to such expenditure of labor and money. The
end is supposed to justify the means. But when the creatures to be
trained are human beings, and when the end to be reached is not
race-horses, but merely citizens, we employ a very different process
of reasoning.

That this subject of early training is a vitally interesting one to
thinking people cannot be denied. The kindergarten has become the
fashion, you say, cynically. This is scarcely true; but it is a fact
that the upper, the middle, and the lower classes among us begin
to recognize the existence of children under six years of age,
and realize that far from being nonentities in life, or unknown
quantities, they are very lively units in the sum of progressive
education.

When we speak of kindergarten work among the children of the poor, and
argue its claims as one of the best means of taking unfortunate little
Arabs from the demoralizing life of the streets, and of giving their
aimless hands something useful to do, their restless minds something
good and fruitful to think of, and their curious eyes something
beautiful to look on, there is not a word of disapproval. People seem
willing to concede its moral value when applied to the lower classes,
but, when they are obliged to pay anything to procure this training
for their own children, or see any prospect of what they call an
already extravagant school system made more so by its addition, they
become prolific in doubts. In other words, they believe in it when you
call it _philanthropy_, but not when you call it _education_; and it
must be called the germ of the better education, toward which we are
all struggling, the nearest app