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A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties, and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.

If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat, for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother, finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful. The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too, not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there were no schoolmaster?