merely for the asking, they become dissatisfied with everything except
the best. This is the dominant tendency in the city and wherever parents
are foolish enough to satisfy the child's every whim. If the parents
carry the child in this manner, the child, in later years, will have
weak legs and the parents will have weak backs. Moreover, love and
respect move in the direction of activity, and if everything comes the
child's way there will be little love, except "cupboard love," going the
other way.

It is unfortunate for children to experience the best too early in life;
there is then no room for growth and development. It was Professor James
who said that the best doll he ever saw was a home-made rag doll; it
left sufficient room for the play of the imagination. With the perfect,
factory-made doll there is nothing more for the imagination to do; it is
complete, but it is not the little girl who has completed it. In the
country, men and women, boys and girls are induced to begin and complete
all kinds of things. Many things have to be made outright and most
things have to be repaired on the farm. Challenges of this kind to
inventiveness and activity are outstanding all the time. Sleds, both
large and small, wheelbarrows and hay racks, sheds, granaries, and barns
are both made and repaired. But in all there is no mad rush. It is not
as it is in the factory or in the sawmill. One is not reduced to the
instantaneous reactions of an automaton; he has time to breathe and to
think. One can act like a free man rather than like a machine. There is
room for thought and for invention.

=Activity Rather than Passivity.=--In this infinite variety of
stimulation and response, the youth is induced to become active rather
than passive. While he is not pushed unduly, he is reasonably active
during all his waking hours, and the habit of activity, of doing, is
ingrained. This is closely related to character and morality, to thrift
and success. Such a person is more likely to be a creditor than a debtor
to society. In this respect the country and the farm have been the
salvation of many a youth.

In the city many children have no regular employment; they have no
chores to do and no regular occupation. Evenings and vacations find
them on the streets. Then Satan always finds mischief for idle hands to
do. These children become passive except under the impulses of instinct
or of mischievous ideas; they have no regular and systematic work