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For instance, no adult was obliged to shout commandingly to the little-girl waitress not to drop her soup-tureen to brush the fly from her nose. She was so filled with the pride of her responsible position that she obeyed the same inner impulse towards self-control which induces adult self-sacrifice. On the other hand, the buttoning boy did not refrain by a similar, violent effort of his will from snatching the blocks from the arithmetical children. It simply never occurred to him, so happily absorbed was he in his own task.

I asked, of course, the question which obsesses every new observer in a Children’s Home, “But what do you do, with all this fine theory of absolute freedom, when a child is naughty? Sometimes, even if not often, you surely must encounter the kicking, screaming, snatching, hair-pulling ‘bad’ child!” I was told then that the health of such a child is looked into at once, such perverted violence being almost certainly the result of deranged physical condition. If nothing pathological can be discovered, he is treated as a morally sick child, given a little table by himself, from which he can look on at the cheerful, ordered play of the schoolroom, allowed any and all toys he desires, petted, soothed, indulged, pitied, but (of course this is the vital point) severely let alone by the other children, who are told that he is “sick” and so cannot play with them until he gets well. This quiet isolation, with its object-lesson of good-natured play among the other children, has a hypnotically calming effect, the child’s “naughtiness” for very lack of food to feed upon, or resistance to blow its flames, disappears and dies away.