a series of important statutes dealing with the same subject. They culminated in the Children's Act of 1908 with its 133 clauses, and thus altogether, during the last seventy years since 1840, some 110 statutes have been carried to mitigate our reproach.
With the act of 1908 the second stage of this long process approached its apogee, and is giving way to the third. It is with this third stage that the future is more closely concerned.
This third stage, which promises to be a very long one, was perhaps definitely inaugurated in 1908, by the report of the Committee on the school attendances of children below the age of five. This body, composed of twenty-one of our gravest experts, in a parliamentary report of 350 pages boldly entered the precincts of the nursery with a temerity unknown till then. They patronised net-beds. They tabulated the respective merits of black-boards and gold-fish. They acquiesced in the existence of Noah's Ark. They passed the rocking-horse. They descended as deep as sand troughs. They even authorised the unequal combat to continue between the spade and the sand-pie, on the one hand, and the ocean, on the other. Is the nursery to be revolutionised? For perambulators were not specified, and will the go-cart go?
But the Committee touched upon matters weightier and wider even than these. They laid it down that the first three years of a child's life are the most critical of all, and they pointed out
