THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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good will. The slums will not hold them, when the power comes to forsake the life of the tenement. The kindergarten to many children seems like a real heaven with blooming flowers and sunshine and singing birds. The warmth and light and kindli­ness of the place first attracts, and then the love for it all comes “The kindergarten is the largest step forward yet taken in the race with poverty;” though the kinder­garten plays, the fancy is so filled with shapes of joy that the poorest and hungriest boy gains the power to create his own environment. In fancy he roams the daisy fields, or the green forests. Or, perhaps, the heat of the summer and the squalor of his surroundings are lost, as he personates the fish diving and darting along the clear, rippling stream. The songs and talks and plays have made “ his mind a mansion for all lovely forms,” and have given him a new environment. A new earth has been created around him, and he looks toward a new heaven. This heaven he finds within himself, as he is guided constantly to happy companionship, not only with the forms and voices of Nature which are pictured and presented to him, but with his fellows. He learns that there is a larger family than that dwelling within the attic room, of which he is a member. In the kindergarten he is a part of an embryo community, where all the duties and rights of citizenship are taught by daily intercourse. The law of this community is the Golden Rule, and all actions are measured by its golden standard.

But every community must have its industrial life, and this child society is no exception. By making work beautiful it becomes interesting and a love of work grows up within this circle of children, where the hum of industry is as pleasant as the hum of the traditional bee. Idleness, which is the cause of crimes and woes manifold, finds an arch enemy in the kindergarten, where diligence in business is the ruling principle. The value of this training to work and to love work cannot be ignored by those who see the need of a better industrial development in our country.

The kindergarten, too, constantly contradicts the old dictum of Plato, that the useful arts are degrading. The work of the blacksmith, the cooper, the farmer, the miller, the clothier are represented in the games of the children. It is a joy to be a blacksmith and to hammer well, because we can then set a shoe for ahorse. Without the horse the farmer could not carry his grain to the miller, and the flour could not be ground and the children could not be fed. So the beauty and the honor of the work are made to depend on what it gives to others, and in his representative play the four- year-old may gain the great truth as a life possession, which we name the interde­pendence of mankind on the solidarity of the race.

“ Everybody has to have everybody,” exclaimed the child on whom this great thought had dawned through his play. Can any minister or teacher phrase it better? Can there be any better thought for the child, standing on the portal of the future, to carry with him into the undiscovered land? If everybody needs everybody, some­body needs him. If he accepts this universal relationship, he has already become an heir to his true kingdom He has come into possession of his own.