all broadly, meeting and talking with people of diverse culture and
tradition, but knows how much our intercourse is cumbered by
hesitations about quantity and accent, and petty differences of phrase
and idiom, and how greatly intonation and accent may warp and limit our
sympathy.

And while they are doing this for the general linguistic atmosphere,
the New Republicans could also attempt something to reach the children
in detail.

By instinct nearly every mother wants to teach. Some teach by instinct,
but for the most part there is a need of guidance in their teaching. At
present these first and very important phases in education are guided
almost entirely by tradition. The necessary singing and talking to very
young children is done in imitation of similar singing and talking; it
is probably done no better, it may possibly be done much worse, than it
was done two hundred years ago. A very great amount of permanent
improvement in human affairs might be secured in this direction by the
expenditure of a few thousand pounds in the systematic study of the
most educational method of dealing with children in the first two or
three years of life, and in the intelligent propagation of the
knowledge obtained. There exist already, it is true, a number of Child
Study Associations, Parents' Unions, and the like, but for the most
part these are quite ineffectual talking societies, akin to Browning
Societies, Literary and Natural History Societies: they attain a
trifling amount of mutual improvement at their best, the members read
papers to one another, and a few medical men and schools secure a
needed advertisement. They have no organization, no concentration of
their energy, and their chief effect seems to be to present an interest
in education as if it were a harmless, pointless fad. But if a few men