A holiday in Rome, the Eternally Old, the Eternally Young. A long, sun-dried street that flanks the Tiber is gay with fruit venders who push along their carts of gold oranges, strings of dates, and amber lemons. Italians of the wealthy class mingle in friendly fashion with the native-costumed peasants. Someone starts a snatch of song; a dozen passersby take up the strain. Where the chariots of the CÆsars rattled by in yesterday’s centuries, there rises a stately row of stucco apartment mansions with terraced gardens where pink roses and purple heliotrope run riot over the hedges and silver-toned fountains sing, all day long, their tinkling tunes.

Leaving the gay, bright street, you ring the electric bell at number 5 Principessa Clotilde.

“Is the Dottoressa at home, or is she keeping holiday, too?” you ask of the porter. He laughs, motioning you to an almost human elevator that lifts itself and will stop at whichever floor you ask it.

“Yes, La Dottoressa Montessori is in—in fact, she is nearly always in because of the many people, mainly Americans, who come to see her. And the children come daily to see her as well.” The porter shrugs his shoulders, uncomprehendingly, as you enter the elevator and stop at the fourth floor. The popularity of this tenant of his is a matter of wonder to the porter.

As a low-voiced maid opens a great carved door and you find yourself in Dr. Montessori’s apartment, you hold your breath at the modernism of it. Plain white woodwork, fine old rugs covering the stone floors, the soft tan walls covered with a few beautiful tapestries; French furniture and electric lights. The reception room in which you wait might be that of an American home, but a glance out of the open window unfolds to you the heart of the tenant. While her home is in one of the most beautiful and cultured centers of Rome, Dr. Montessori sees daily a tiny, narrow Roman alleyway where the “people” live like bees in a hive and the doorsills throng with little children and their voices rise to her every hour of the day.

But you hear a step. You turn. You are face to face with Maria Montessori.

At first you have no words. You have seen her picture in America, but it gave you no conception of the fine, chiseled beauty of the woman who stands before you dressed in severe black that accentuates the marble of the classic features, the depth of the far-seeing, dark eyes. Poise, grace, self-control, sympathy, love of humanity are written on the face. It is as if all the Madonnas of the imagination of the old Italian painters had come to life in La Dottoressa. Overpowering the first glance of courteous welcome, though, that accompanied her outstretched hand is a look of stern query.

Why have you come? Are you another of the curious visitors who have besieged her from almost every nation the past year to try and grasp in a day her method of teaching that she gained only through twenty years of patient, tireless scientific study of the child mind, she seems to ask. But your words come like a torrent now. You assure her that you have made this pilgrimage to Rome, not as an individual, but as the voice of thousands of mothers who have children to be educated. They ask Dr. Montessori, through you, for her message to the American people. As you linger over the words, madre, mother, and bambino, baby, Dr. Montessori smiles. You have set her doubts at rest. She talks fast, eloquently, in her musical Italian, and you listen, thrilled, fascinated. Often you are interrupted, but always by children. Lovely, dark-eyed, courteous little Roman boys and girls they are. They come from you know not where, are admitted to Dr. Montessori’s apartment quite as if they were adult visitors, and after they have greeted her in their graceful, polite fashion, they quietly run about the room or sit in groups talking together as if the apartment were the popular meeting place for all the children of the neighborhood. You find their interruption and their presence a help instead of a hindrance to your interview. They illustrate by their loving friendship for La Dottoressa and each other, and by their complete self-control, the message that Dr. Montessori gives you to carry back to the American people.

She would liberate the children.

The American people are free, but American children are not.

We have lost sight of the Republic of Childhood, she says. Through forcing our adult standards of conduct and teaching upon children, we have closed the gateways of their souls. We must believe that every child, well-born into the world, is going to be good and happy and intelligent if we as parents and teachers give him a fair chance. We must stop commanding our children. Instead, we will lead them.

Dr. Montessori tells us that we are undergoing a slow but certain change in the social structure of society. Woman is being emancipated from her domestic slavery of yesterday. We are creating a new and more healthful environment for the laboring man. But the American child is still a slave to the capricious commands of his parents, which claim his soul and prevent his free, natural development to his best manhood. In school, too, children are still bound.

The vertebral column, Dr. Montessori tells us, which is biologically the most fundamental part of the human skeleton; which survived the desperate struggles of primitive man against the beasts of the desert, helped him to quarry out a shelter for himself from the solid rock and bend iron to his uses, cannot resist the bondages of the present-day school desk. Curvature of the spine is alarmingly prevalent among children and is increasing. Instead of resorting to surgical methods, corsets, braces, and orthopÆdic means for straightening child bodies, we should try to bring about some more rational method of teaching that children shall no longer be obliged to remain for the greater part of the day in such a pathologically dangerous position.

Not only do we hurt child bodies by the confinement of the school desk, but we wound their souls by ever offering rewards and punishments, by insisting upon such long periods of absolute silence as are demanded in our schools, and by imposing upon children a program of instruction that is built, often by law, to be followed by large groups of children. The normal child is he who finds it impossible to follow a program of school work or to obey, unquestioningly, the arbitrary commands of his parents. He must follow his own bent, providing he does not interfere with the freedom of others, if he is to dig out his own life path. The abnormal child is the one who never resists; he is the child who, without dissent, obeys all adult commands.

So Dr. Montessori, who has discovered a method of free teaching by means of which children from two and a half to five develop naturally and happily along lines that culminate in a spontaneous “explosion” into self-taught reading and writing at four and five years, speaks to the American parent.

She begs us to give our children the freedom that is the American nation’s boast. Not the freedom that would lead to disordered acts, but that liberty which means the untrammeled exercise of all the moral and intellectual powers that are born with the individual.

About twenty years ago Maria Montessori, a beautiful young society girl of Rome, startled Italy by receiving with honors her degree as Doctor of Medicine. The Italian girl of the cultured classes is essentially a home girl. She studies at home, she embroiders, she plays with flowers, she is introduced to society—then she marries. That Maria Montessori should desert the quiet, rose-strewn paths of Roman dÉbutantes and, after taking her degree, act as assistant doctor in the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome, startled all Italy.

Her work at the clinic led her to visit the general insane asylums, and she became deeply interested in the deficient children who were housed there, with no attempts being made to educate them. As she studied these helpless little ones, the idea came to her that it might be possible, by putting them into better surroundings, and giving them opportunity for free gymnastic activities and free use of the senses, to educate them. She gave up medicine for teaching and again startled Italy—and the world. Her deficient children learned to read and write, easily and naturally, and took their places beside normal children in the municipal schools.

Then Dr. Montessori carried her method of physical and sense education a lap farther. If this method stimulated to action the sleeping mind of a deficient child, might it not save time and energy in the teaching of normal children, she asked herself. At that time, the Good Building Association of Rome was tearing down the squalid, disease-filled houses of the poor of the San Lorenzo Quarter and putting up in their places hygienic model tenements. Dr. Montessori arranged to have the children of each tenement gathered in one room of the basement, where large, free spaces, didactic apparatus, hot meals, and gardens would make it a Children’s House. She applied her method in numerous of these Children’s Houses and in the beautiful convent of the Franciscan nuns on the Via Giusti.

Again the miracle happened. Children of four began to read and write, having taught themselves. There were other wonders, too. These Montessori-trained children were self-controlled, free, happy, good. To-day there are Montessori mothers all over the world.

To furnish the right environment for the expanding of the child soul, Dr. Montessori urges that every home be transformed into a House of Childhood. It will not consist alone of walls, she tells us, although these walls will be the bulwarks of the sacred intimacy of the family. The home will be more than this. It will have a soul, and will embrace its inmates with the consoling arms of love. The new mother will be liberated, like the butterfly bursting its winter cocoon of imprisonment and darkness, from those drudgeries that the home has demanded of her in the past, leaving her better able to bear strong children, study those children, teach them, and be a social force in the world.

The new father will cultivate his health, guard his virtue, that he may better the species and make his children better, more perfect, and stronger than any which have been created before.

The ideal home of to-morrow will be the home of those men and women who wish to improve the human species and send the race on its triumphant way into eternity.

So Dr. Montessori, physician, psychologist, teacher, lover of children, and womanly woman, speaks to us.

As one says addio and leaves her and goes down into the blue, star-filled evening of the Eternal City, the night seems to be charged with a new mystery. Rome, who holds in her beautiful hands such good gifts for us—art, sculpture, history, painting—now offers to us another. Stretching farther than the moss-grown stones that line the Appian Way, she shows us a new road—the way that leads to the soul of a little child.