owing to the invincible inability and prejudice displayed in that department of our social system. Now, however, that outside influences have begun, in 1909, to penetrate successfully into the homes we may expect an eventual response of the infantile death-rate, which, indeed, in 1909 fell from the 1901-8 average of 133 per thousand to the unprecedentedly low figure of 109, and again in 1910 to 106. The fivefold influence of teachers, health visitors, inspecting officers, care committees, and medical officers, of whom to-day there are nearly a thousand, has now at last been mobilised against parental inefficiency and in favour of the child. The work of rebuilding the national physique has at last been initiated, and must for many generations to come call forth our energies. If Comte said rightly that the first seven years of life are the most decisive, it is in the family that the national existence is primarily at stake.
After the nursery, the school. The school is the next stage of human life, and here too the family has shown itself quite unable to satisfy the call of the future.
As with so much else, it was at Athens that the theory of elementary education was first formulated. For Socrates, on his visit to the Athenian workshops, laid it down that though the artisan, in virtue of his technical skill, has an advantage over the thinker, what he needs is culture after all. That proposition, after twenty-
