In a second case, successfully handled by another New England psychopathologist, Dr. Boris Sidis, the patient was a young man of twenty-five, afflicted with a weird medley of physical and mental symptoms. He had frequent attacks of headache and dizziness, during which he also felt so cold that even in summer he would be obliged to wrap himself in many blankets. In addition, he suffered from a variety of phobias, or abnormal fears. He was afraid of being alone in closed places, particularly at night, he had a morbid terror of the dead and of graveyards, and he was almost insanely afraid of dogs. By psychopathological analysis every one of these symptoms was traced to some painful episode of his early childhood.

He had been born and brought up in a village of Poland, near a large forest. At the age of three some one had frightened him almost into convulsions by declaring that several dogs coming from the forest were wolves hastening to devour him. His fear of closed places was linked with a terrible experience occurring a few years. later, when he had passed a midwinter night in a barn, hiding from a party of drunken soldiers who had beaten his father and killed one of his brothers. The attacks of dizziness, headache, and cold were related to the same experience. As to his dread of the dead and of graveyards, this was due partly to tales of ghosts and evil spirits he had heard as a child, and partly to a foolish act of his superstitious mother, who, when he was nine, had placed the cold hand of a corpse on his naked chest as a cure for some trifling ailment.

As he grew older, much of this had vanished from remembrance; but every detail had been subconsciously preserved, to give rise in time to the symptoms enumerated, each of which was readily overcome after the detection of its underlying cause.

In like manner, the seemingly epileptic attacks of a nineteen-year-old street Arab of New York were found to be nothing more than the external manifestation of

in a dark, damp, terror-inspiring cellar. The sight of the discolored corpse of a man who had died of cholera left in the mind of a sensitive girl of ten such a painful impression that years afterward, quite unaccountably as it seemed, she developed an abnormal fear of contracting some deadly disease; and had she not fortunately been taken to an able psychopathologist, Dr. Pierre Janet, would almost certainly have ended her days in an asylum for the insane. An overworked Boston young man was attacked with the insistent notion that he had committed "the unpardonable sin," and was doomed to suffer tortures in hell for all eternity. Confined for a time in an asylum, psychopathological investigation paved the way to a complete cure by demonstrating that his seeming dementia præcox was in reality only the hysterical product of subconsciously remembered fears of childhood. The victim himself eventually recognized this, declaring in an autobiographical statement he made at his physician's request:

"My abnormal fears certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly Woman who taught Sunday-school. My early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me if I was not good enough to be saved."

So frequently, in short, have the world's leading psychopathologists found the remote origins of hysteria, psychasthenia, and other psychoneuroses in unpleasant memories lingering subconsciously from the first years of life that they indorse with one accord Angelo Mosso's emphatic declaration, "Every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long." Of course not all children develop some psychoneurosis as a result of infantile fears and frights; it is only the ultra-sensitive who thus suffer, or children who later become nervously disorganized from any cause, like illness, worry, prolonged fatigue, etc. But in one way or another it

may confidently be said that these early. shocks more or less affect all children.

If they do not suffer in health, they may suffer in character, displaying in adult life either a certain lack of self-confidence, strange streaks of superstitious ideas and usages, or outright cowardice: Psychologists, for that matter, stressing this dual principle of the extreme impressionability of childhood and the lasting effect of childhood's impressions, are beginning to find therein the explanation of much of the irrationality of thought and conduct that often characterizes fullgrown and "educated" men and women. In the words of Dr. Louis Waldstein:

In those early impressions of which no one seems to be conscious, least of all the child, and which gather up power as the rolling avalanche, the elements are collected for future emotions, moods, acts, that make up a greater part of the history of the individual and of States, more effective and significant than those that are written down in mémoires, however intimes, or that can be discovered in archives, however "secret." The strange vagaries of affection and passion, which affect the whole existence of men and women-the racial and religious prejudices that shake States and communities to their very foundations, that make and unmake reputations, and set the wheel of progress back into the Dark Ages-can be traced to such small beginnings and into those nooks of man's subconscious memory.

The significance of this to the parent scarcely needs to be elaborated. It means that the process of education should begin in the home and in the earliest infancy. Instead of intrusting children to the care of ignorant and often superstitious nurses, as many parents unhappily still do, the father and the mother should themselves take their upbringing in hand. Instead of controlling them by the dominance of fear, frightening them into good behavior by threats of punishment or by tales of ghosts, bogies, or policemen, the appeal should always be to the instinctive affection which every normal child feels for his parents.

The whole environment should be so adjusted as, on the one hand, to safeguard the little ones as far as possible from painful emotional stresses, and, on the other hand, by the virtue of a good example to develop in them traits which will enable them to withstand the shocks and trials certain to be experienced soon or late. Assuredly, such a policy is not merely desirable, but absolutely indispensable, in view of the facts above set forth.

Nor is this all. Studying the mind of the child in all its aspects, some psychologists have come to the conclusion that, besides manipulating the environment in the child's behalf, formal instruction in the principles of reasoning should be given him long before he reaches school age. As things stand, these psychologists argue, most people do not really think; if they did there would be far less immorality, far less injustice, far less self-created unhappiness than there is in the world today. The reason they do not really think is that their education has not been begun soon enough. Habits are formed early, and, left pretty much to their own devices in early childhood, when the critical faculty is weak, children acquire habits of faulty observation and slipshod reasoning which all their later education will be unable wholly to correct. Whereas, had their interests been guided aright, had they been exercised in the use of their minds as in the use of their bodies, they would afterward have found all study easy, and would have developed into truly rational men and women, of strong intellect as well as strong character.

To the objection that early instruction would involve too severe a strain on the youthful mind, one reply is that under present conditions children tax their minds to an extent undreamed of by most of us. A striking proof of this is found in the remarkable extensiveness of children's vocabularies. It is probable that not nine people out of ten would credit a threeyear-old child with possessing a vocabulary of more than three or four hundred words; but careful investigation has

shown that many two-year-old youngsters have a larger vocabulary than that, and that not a few children of three have command of more than a thousand words. In one case, that of the three-year-old son of Professor Whipple of Cornell University, a vocabulary of nearly eighteen hundred words has been recorded.

Obviously, even if the child by no means understands all the words he uses, the mere fact that he uses so many indicates a tremendous mental activity and a tremendous intellectual curiosity. This is otherwise and still more clearly indicated by the inquisitiveness of every normal. child. He wants to know, and he bombards his parents with a thousand questions. It is the contention of the advocates of the new theory of education that if his questions are not answered as fully and correctly as possible, and if advantage is not taken of the opportunity to ground him in the rudiments of sound reasoning, his curiosity will die away, his mind will tire and cease to function actively, and he will enter school under a handicap of intellectual inertia. To quote one exponent of the new view, Dr. T. A. Williams, the Washington psychopathologist:

An impression prevails that growing organs should not be subjected to work. This is a gross error; for organs which do not work cannot grow well. Even the bones become tough, hard, and large in proportion to the stresses to which they are subjected by frequent and vigorous pulls where the muscles are attached. . . . What is true of structure is true of functional power. From ballet-dancers to violin virtuosi, artists must be trained from early youth. It may be objected that this is so because muscular agility is required, but this objection is only superficial; for dexterity of an artist is

made possible not in virtue of superior coordination of movements themselves, but by reason of the superior speed and accuracy of the guiding mental processes which reside in the brain. As intellectual dexterity is also a result of orderly functioning of mental processes seated in the brain, it should be manifest that these, too, should reach excellence best when they are trained by a capable hand during the formative period of early youth.

But, indeed, apart from all theoretical considerations, those upholding this doctrine of intensive child culture, find a powerful reinforcement for their arguments in the circumstance that the experiment of thus educating children has been tried not once, but several times, and always with astonishing success. Lord Kelvin and his brother, the eminent English engineer James Thomson, were educated in this way; so was John Stuart Mill; so was that great German scholar Karl Witte, the story of whose upbringing is told by his father in a book which I warmly commend to all parents, and which has recently been translated into English by Professor Leo Wiener. And in our own time a group of American parents, Dr. Sidis, Dr. Berle, Professor Wiener, and others have similarly educated their children, with results so impressive as to provoke nation-wide discussion. in educational circles.

My own belief is that the new view is soundly based; that before many years have passed it will be generally accepted; and that, with ever-wider application of the discoveries regarding the physiological and environmental factors conditioning mental growth, it will result in an unprecedented development of the nation and of the human race.

THE

HREE years have passed since the Congress of the United States, realizing that where no wise guidance is the people falleth, but that in the multitude of counselors there is safety, directed the President-Mr. Taft-to appoint a commission of nine members, of whom three should be employers and three should be representatives of organized labor, to inquire into the general condition of labor in the principal industries of the United States, seek to discover underlying causes of dissatisfaction in the industrial situation, and report its conclusions thereon. The commission was to report on the relations between employers and employees, especially in corporations; health, sanitation, and safety in industries; growth and effects of associations of employers and of wage-earners; methods of collective bargaining; means for maintaining industrial peace; methods for avoiding or adjusting labor disputes through peaceful and conciliatory mediation and negotiations; the wider utilization of labor exchanges; and lastly to make suggestions to prevent the smuggling in of Asiatic labor.

Truly a liberal-sized order, with a checking-account of a hundred thousand dollars attached, and later increased to a total of half a million dollars. Mr. Taft, being at the close of a Presidential term, with troubles of his own requiring no little attention, generously handed over the appointment of the commission to his successor, perhaps as a genial bit of Presidential hazing, and doubtless accepted by the Presidential neophyte in like spirit.

There was as much to be expected from this commission of incompatible industrial harmonizers as from a bunch of Progressives and stand-pat Republicans, or female anti-Suffragists and male Suffragettes. The final printed report of the commission contains only one unanimous declaration; that is, a definition of the terms "closed" and "open" shop. On

everything else it was impossible for the commission in its entirety to reach any agreement whatever. Moreover, the members in special supplementary individual statements emphasize the important fact of having reached certain conclusions at variance with their fellow-members. This is specially gratifying to the public, inasmuch as the main force of their report would lie in the unanimity of its conclusions.

The report of the Director of Investigations, Basil M. Manly, occupying 252 pages, is signed by and commended by the four representatives of organized labor as "containing no statement that is unworthy of credence and that will not bear careful investigation." The conclusions and recommendations are warranted by the statement of facts and the accumulated evidence in the hands of the commission.

Five other commissioners find themselves unable "to agree to any of the findings of the staff or any resolutions based upon them because they have not the criticism of employers, employees, and others affected by them, which we consider indispensable in order that we might have before us assurance that they were accurate and not chargeable with important omissions."

For these reasons Professor Commons has prepared an additional one-hundredpage report of his own and of Mrs. Harriman's, of which the chairman of the commission is so hard-hearted as to state, "I feel it my duty to dissent from the same in toto," expressing the opinion that its recommendations are undemocratic and its whole plan opposed to the habits, customs, and traditions of the American people; that its suggestions are impracticable and impossible of performance, opening up unlimited opportunities for graft and corruption, establishing bureaucratic supervision. of the economic condition of workers, and an autocratic control over business opera

tions repugnant to American standards of freedom in manufacture and commerce. But where are we?

So there we are. It is certainly depressing to think of the final cost for a hundred million Americans if it costs five hundred thousand dollars to educate nine intelligent persons to the point where they cannot agree to disagree politely. A happy thought tells us that perhaps we may all continue to disagree contentedly without the aid of any commissions or the expenditure of a cent.

The American public has reason to criticize harshly a commission of industrial relations which was too restricted in outlook to comprehend the direction in which lies the solution of all problems involving industrial, legislative, or civic relations. Is it to be gainsaid that such problems are problems in education?

In corresponding measure to the degree and amount of ignorance in any community, there must coëxist justice and injustice, fair play or exploitation, contentment or unrest. In a country like ours, where millions of adults are unable even to read and write, and millions more rarely read even a daily paper, where many millions speak no English, and other millions are dependents and semi-defectives, is it strange that the more intelligent should be able to use to their own financial advantage the unschooled, the ignorant, and the unfortunate, that conditions of oppression should exist, and that industrial unrest should result? We should expect of a commission of industrial relations the analytical ability to tell their fellow-countrymen something more fundamental and less obvious concerning the causes of industrial unrest than that some people are rich and some are poor, that there exists unemployment, that judges are not always just, or that there are not everywhere right and opportunity to form effective labor organizations. We should expect an analysis of more basic factors underlying these self-evident conditions. We should look for a lucid exposition of how the public school may reach greater numbers for a longer period, and thus make for a better schooling of the people, and how the

application of knowledge may replace emotionalism, prejudice, and passion in industrial relations; we should be given an evaluation of illiteracy and its relation to industrial exploitation, a definition of wage-worth, and how it may be increased, an authoritative study of disease in its relation to industrial incapacity and consequent low earning-power; a convincing. demonstration of the connection between low-wage standard, scant purchasing. power, limited industrial outlets, and sequent industrial struggles; an exact analysis of the scientific wage, and how it may be introduced. More basic remedies should have been proposed than mere economic blood-letting in the form of an in

come-tax.

Instead of a serious analysis of industrial relations, we were treated for months to the edifying and continuous spectacle of an itinerant forensic circus with side-show attractions and unlimited free newspaper advertising of the personnel of the commission. We are within our rights in expecting from experts not commonplaces of conversation or special pleas for panaceas, but facts and practical common sense as related to fundamental social conditions, and clear-cut statements as a guide for remedial action, not glittering legislative inconsistencies. A priceless chance to improve work relations has been wantonly. wasted through lack of team-work and constructive leadership.