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LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

river of human misery that is flowing ever into the night of forgetfulness. Yet, need this river be so deep—so wide? "No," say the school doctors standing at its source. "No," thunders even the merest tyro, perceiving how slight, how curable in the earlier stages are the fierce maladies that mow down at last the sons and daughters of poverty.

The day will come doubtless when the task of those who prevent illness will be thought more highly of. The day is nigh, perhaps, when the elementary school will have quite openly as its first great aim the conquest of health and sanity for its children.

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Into the hands of the working people the guidance and control of education is bound to fall in an ever-growing degree as the years pass. They will be drawn into this work through their own children attending school, and sharing the life of the school. And they will be drawn into it also because they are bound to play a more and more important part in the counsel of the nation, and to become more conscious of the causes of its successes and its failures.

This growing power of the people is a thing in which every class of worker must rejoice at last and find his safety. For it cannot be well for a nation to fall under the power of any one class or profession,