induce sleep. Seldom do we seek rest so tired physically that we drop off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. With some of us the suggestion is only powerful in our own bed, that on which it has acted on unnumbered nights. We cannot, as we say, sleep in a strange bed. It is suggestion, not direct will power, that acts. No one can absolutely will himself to sleep. In insomnia it is the attempt to replace the unconscious auto-suggestion by a conscious voluntary effort of will that causes the difficulty. A thousand times in the night we resolve that now we will sleep. If we could but cease to make these fruitless efforts, sleep might come of itself and the suggestion or habit be re-established.

In little children the suggestion of sleep, provoked by being placed in bed, sometimes acts very irregularly. Often it may succeed for a week or two, and then some untoward happening breaks the habit, and night after night, for a long time, sleep is refused. The wakeful child put to bed, resents the process, and cries and sobs miserably, to the infinite distress of his mother. It then becomes just as likely that the child will connect his bed in his mind, not with rest and sleep, but with sobbing and crying on his part, and mingled entreaties and scoldings from his nurse or mother. An important part in this perversion of the suggestion is played by the attitude of the person who puts the child to bed. Often the nurse is uniformly successful, while the mother, who is perhaps more distressed by the sobbing of the child, as consistently fails, because she has been unable to hide her apprehension from him, and has conveyed to his mind a sense of his own power.

Just in the same way, grown-up people, filled with anxiety because of the helplessness of the young child, unable to divest their minds of the fears of the hundred and one accidents that may befall, or that within their own experience have befallen, a little child at one time or another, unconsciously make unwise suggestions which fill his mind with apprehension and terror. They do not like their children to show fear of animals. Nor would they if it were not that their own apprehension that the child may be hurt communicates itself to him. The child is not of himself afraid to fall, it is they who suffer the anxiety and show it by treating the fall as a disaster. The child is not of himself afraid to be left alone in a room. It is they who sap his confidence in himself, because they do not venture to leave him out of their sight, from a nameless dread of what may happen. A little girl cut her finger and ran to her nurse, pleased and interested: "See," she said, seeing it bleed, "fingers all jammy." Only when the nurse grasped her with unwise expressions of horror did she break into cries of fear. A town-bred nurse, who is afraid of cows, will make every country walk an ordeal of fear for the children.

Every mother must be made to realise the ease with which these unconscious suggestions act upon the mind of the little child, and should school herself to be strong to make her child strong, and to see to it that all this suggestive force is utilised for good and not for evil.

It is upon this susceptibility to suggestion that a great part of his early education reposes. No one who is incapable of profiting by this natural disposition of the child can be successful in her management of him. Turn where you will in his daily life the influence of this force of suggestion is clearly apparent. The child does without questioning that which he is confidently expected to do. Thus he will eat what is given him, and sleep soundly when he is put to bed if only the appropriate suggestion and not the contrary is made to him. Again we have seen that a perversion of suggestion of this sort is a common source of constipation in early childhood. If the child's attention is directed towards the difficulty, if he is urged or ordered or appealed to to perform his part, if failure is looked upon as a serious misfortune, the bowels may remain obstinately unmoved. In children as in adults a too great concentration of attention inhibits the action of the bowels, and constipation, in many persons, is due to the attempt to substitute will power for the force of habitual suggestion. No matter what other treatment we adopt, the mother must be careful to hide from the child that his failure is distressing to her. A cheerful optimism which teaches him to regard himself as one who is conspicuously regular in his habits, and who has a reputation in this respect to live up to is sure to succeed. To talk before him of his habitual constipation, and to worry over the difficulty, is as surely to fail. In the same way unwise suggestion can interfere with the passing of water at regular and suitable intervals. There are children who constantly desire to pass water on any occasion, which is conspicuously inappropriate, because their attention has been concentrated on the sensations in the bladder. Often enough when at great inconvenience opportunity has been found, the desire has passed away, and all the trouble has proved needless. It is not too much to say that every occupation and every action of the day can be made delightful or hateful to the child, according to the suggestion with which it is presented and introduced. Dressing and undressing, eating and drinking, bathing, washing, the putting away of toys, even going to bed, can be made matters of enthralling interest or delight, or a subject for tears and opposition, according to the bias which is given to the child's mind by the words, attitude, and actions of nurses and mothers.

Here we approach very near to the heart of the subject. Stripped of all that is not essential we see the problem of the management of children reduced to the interplay between the adult mind and the mind of the receptive suggestible child. That which is thought of and feared for the child, that he rapidly becomes. Placid, comfortable people who do not worry about their children find their children sensible and easy to manage. Parents who take a pride in the daring and naughty pranks of their children unconsciously convey the suggestion to their minds that such conduct is characteristic of them. Nervous and apprehensive parents who are distressed when the child refuses to eat or to sleep, and who worry all day long over possible sources of danger to him, are forced to watch their child acquire a reputation for nervousness, which, as always, is passively accepted and consistently acted up to. Differences in type, determined by hereditary factors, no doubt, exist and are often strongly marked. Yet it is not untrue to say that variations in children, dependent upon heredity, show chiefly in the relative susceptibility or insusceptibility of the child to the influences of environment and management. It is no easy task to distinguish between the nervous child and the child of the nervous mother, between the child who inherits an unusually sensitive nervous system and the child who is nervous only because he breathes constantly an atmosphere charged with doubt and anxiety.