TO A FATHER

225. 'Little children,' says the Scripture, 'are like arrows in the hands of the giant, and blessed is the man that hath his quiver full of them'; a beautiful figure to describe, in forcible terms, the support, the power, which a father derives from being surrounded by a family. And what father, thus blessed, is there who does not feel, in this sort of support, a reliance which he feels in no other? In regard to this sort of support there is no uncertainty, no doubts, no misgivings; it is yourself that you see in your children: their bosoms are the safe repository of even the whispers of your mind: they are the great and unspeakable delight of your youth, the pride of your prime of life, and the props of your old age. They proceed from that love, the pleasures of which no tongue or pen can adequately describe, and the various blessings which they bring are equally incapable of description.

226. But, to make them blessings, you must act your part well; for they may, by your neglect, your ill-treatment, your evil example, be made to be the contrary of blessings; instead of pleasure, they may bring you pain; instead of making your heart glad, the sight of them may make it sorrowful; instead of being the staff of your old age, they may bring your gray hairs in grief to the grave.

227. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance, that you here act well your part, omitting nothing, even from the very beginning, tending to give you great and unceasing influence over their minds; and, above all things, to ensure, if possible, an ardent love of their mother. Your first duty towards them is resolutely to prevent their drawing the means of life from any breast but hers. That is their own; it is their birthright; and if that fail from any natural cause, the place of it ought to be supplied by those means which are frequently resorted to without employing a hireling breast. I am aware of the too frequent practice of the contrary; I am well aware of the offence which I shall here give to many; but it is for me to do my duty, and to set, with regard to myself, consequences at defiance.

228. In the first place, no food is so congenial to the child as the milk of its own mother; its quality is made by nature to suit the age of the child; it comes with the child, and is calculated precisely for its stomach. And, then, what sort of a mother must that be who can endure the thought of seeing her child at another breast! The suckling may be attended with great pain, and it is so attended in many cases; but this pain is a necessary consequence of pleasures foregone; and, besides, it has its accompanying pleasures too. No mother ever suffered more than my wife did from suckling her children. How many times have I seen her, when the child was beginning to draw, bite her lips while the tears ran down her cheeks! Yet, having endured this, the smiles came and dried up the tears; and the little thing that had caused the pain received abundant kisses as its punishment.

229. Why, now, did I not love her the more for this? Did not this tend to rivet her to my heart? She was enduring this for me; and would not this endearing thought have been wanting, if I had seen the baby at a breast that I had hired and paid for; if I had had two women, one to bear the child and another to give it milk? Of all the sights that this world affords, the most delightful in my eyes, even to an unconcerned spectator, is, a mother with her clean and fat baby lugging at her breast, leaving off now-and-then and smiling, and she, occasionally, half smothering it with kisses. What must that sight be, then, to the father of the child?

230. Besides, are we to overlook the great and wonderful effect that this has on the minds of children? As they succeed each other, they see with their own eyes, the pain, the care, the caresses, which their mother has endured for, or bestowed, on them; and nature bids them love her accordingly. To love her ardently becomes part of their very nature; and when the time comes that her advice to them is necessary as a guide for their conduct, this deep and early impression has all its natural weight, which must be wholly wanting if the child be banished to a hireling breast, and only brought at times into the presence of the mother, who is, in fact, no mother, or, at least, but half a one. The children who are thus banished, love (as is natural and just) the foster-mother better than the real mother as long as they are at the breast. When this ceases, they are taught to love their own mother most; but this teaching is of a cold and formal kind. They may, and generally do, in a short time, care little about the foster-mother; the teaching weans all their affection from her, but it does not transfer it to the other.

231. I had the pleasure to know, in Hampshire, a lady who had brought up a family of ten children by hand, as they call it. Owing to some defect, she could not suckle her children; but she wisely and heroically resolved, that her children should hang upon no other breast, and that she would not participate in the crime of robbing another child of its birthright, and, as is mostly the case, of its life. Who has not seen these banished children, when brought and put into the arms of their mothers, screaming to get from them, and stretch out their little hands to get back into the arms of the nurse, and when safely got there, hugging the hireling as if her bosom were a place of refuge? Why, such a sight is, one would think, enough to strike a mother dead. And what sort of a husband and father, I want to know, must that be, who can endure the thought of his child loving another woman more than its own mother and his wife?

232. And besides all these considerations, is there no crime in robbing the child of the nurse, and in exposing it to perish? It will not do to say that the child of the nurse may be dead, and thereby leave her breast for the use of some other. Such cases must happen too seldom to be at all relied on; and, indeed, every one must see, that, generally speaking, there must be a child cast off for every one that is put to a hireling breast. Now, without supposing it possible, that the hireling will, in any case, contrive to get rid of her own child, every man who employs such hireling, must know, that he is exposing such child to destruction; that he is assisting to rob it of the means of life; and, of course, assisting to procure its death, as completely as a man can, in any case, assist in causing death by starvation; a consideration which will make every just man in the world recoil at the thought of employing a hireling breast. For he is not to think of pacifying his conscience by saying, that he knows nothing about the hireling's child. He does know; for he must know, that she has a child, and that he is a principal in robbing it of the means of life. He does not cast it off and leave it to perish himself, but he causes the thing to be done; and to all intents and purposes, he is a principal in the cruel and cowardly crime.

233. And if an argument could possibly be yet wanting to the husband; if his feelings were so stiff as still to remain unmoved, must not the wife be aware that whatever face the world may put upon it, however custom may seem to bear her out; must she not be aware that every one must see the main motive which induces her to banish from her arms that which has formed part of her own body? All the pretences about her sore breasts and her want of strength are vain: nature says that she is to endure the pains as well as the pleasures: whoever has heard the bleating of the ewe for her lamb, and has seen her reconciled, or at least pacified, by having presented to her the skin or some of the blood of her dead lamb: whoever has witnessed the difficulty of inducing either ewe or cow to give her milk to an alien young one: whoever has seen the valour of the timid hen in defending her brood, and has observed that she never swallows a morsel that is fit for her young, until they be amply satisfied: whoever has seen the wild birds, though, at other times, shunning even the distant approach of man, flying and screaming round his head, and exposing themselves to almost certain death in defence of their nests: whoever has seen these things, or any one of them, must question the motive that can induce a mother to banish a child from her own breast to that of one who has already been so unnatural as to banish hers. And, in seeking for a motive sufficiently powerful to lead to such an act, women must excuse men, if they be not satisfied with the ordinary pretences; they must excuse me, at any rate, if I do not stop even at love of ease and want of maternal affection, and if I express my fear, that, superadded to the unjustifiable motives, there is one which is calculated to excite disgust; namely, a desire to be quickly freed from that restraint which the child imposes, and to hasten back, unbridled and undisfigured, to those enjoyments, to have an eagerness for which, or to wish to excite a desire for which, a really delicate woman will shudder at the thought of being suspected.

234. I am well aware of the hostility that I have here been exciting; but there is another, and still more furious, bull to take by the horns, and which would have been encountered some pages back (that being the proper place), had I not hesitated between my duty and my desire to avoid giving offence; I mean the employing of male-operators, on those occasions where females used to be employed. And here I have every thing against me; the now general custom, even amongst the most chaste and delicate women; the ridicule continually cast on old midwives; the interest of a profession, for the members of which I entertain more respect and regard than for those of any other; and, above all the rest, my own example to the contrary, and my knowledge that every husband has the same apology that I had. But because I acted wrong myself, it is not less, but rather more, my duty to endeavour to dissuade others from doing the same. My wife had suffered very severely with her second child, which, at last, was still-born. The next time I pleaded for the doctor; and, after every argument that I could think of, obtained a reluctant consent. Her life was so dear to me, that every thing else appeared as nothing. Every husband has the same apology to make; and thus, from the good, and not from the bad, feelings of men, the practice has become far too general, for me to hope even to narrow it; but, nevertheless, I cannot refrain from giving my opinion on the subject.

235. We are apt to talk in a very unceremonious style of our rude ancestors, of their gross habits, their want of delicacy in their language. No man shall ever make me believe, that those, who reared the cathedral of ELY (which I saw the other day), were rude, either in their manners or in their minds and words. No man shall make me believe, that our ancestors were a rude and beggarly race, when I read in an act of parliament, passed in the reign of Edward the Fourth, regulating the dresses of the different ranks of the people, and forbidding the LABOURERS to wear coats of cloth that cost more than two shillings a yard (equal to forty shillings of our present money), and forbidding their wives and daughters to wear sashes, or girdles, trimmed with gold or silver. No man shall make me believe that this was a rude and beggarly race, compared with those who now shirk and shiver about in canvass frocks and rotten cottons. Nor shall any man persuade me that that was a rude and beggarly state of things, in which (reign of Edward the Third) an act was passed regulating the wages of labour, and ordering that a woman, for weeding in the corn, should receive a penny a day, while a quart of red wine was sold for a penny, and a pair of men's shoes for two-pence. No man shall make me believe that agriculture was in a rude state, when an act like this was passed, or that our ancestors of that day were rude in their minds, or in their thoughts. Indeed, there are a thousand proofs, that, whether in regard to domestic or foreign affairs, whether in regard to internal freedom and happiness, or to weight in the world, England was at her zenith about the reign of Edward the Third. The Reformation, as it is called, gave her a complete pull down. She revived again in the reigns of the Stuarts, as far as related to internal affairs; but the 'Glorious Revolution' and its debt and its taxes, have, amidst the false glare of new palaces, roads, and canals, brought her down until she is become the land of domestic misery and of foreign impotence and contempt; and, until she, amidst all her boasted improvements and refinements, tremblingly awaits her fall.

236. However, to return from this digression, rude and unrefined as our mothers might be, plain and unvarnished as they might be in their language, accustomed as they might be to call things by their names, though they were not so very delicate as to use the word small-clothes; and to be quite unable, in speaking of horn-cattle, horses, sheep, the canine race, and poultry, to designate them by their sexual appellations; though they might not absolutely faint at hearing these appellations used by others; rude and unrefined and indelicate as they might be, they did not suffer, in the cases alluded to, the approaches of men, which approaches are unceremoniously suffered, and even sought, by their polished and refined and delicate daughters; and of unmarried men too, in many cases; and of very young men.

237. From all antiquity this office was allotted to woman. Moses's life was saved by the humanity of the Egyptian midwife; and to the employment of females in this memorable case, the world is probably indebted for that which has been left it by that greatest of all law-givers, whose institutes, rude as they were, have been the foundation of all the wisest and most just laws in all the countries of Europe and America. It was the fellow feeling of the midwife for the poor mother that saved Moses. And none but a mother can, in such cases, feel to the full and effectual extent that which the operator ought to feel. She has been in the same state herself; she knows more about the matter, except in cases of very rare occurrence, than any man, however great his learning and experience, can ever know. She knows all the previous symptoms; she can judge more correctly than man can judge in such a case; she can put questions to the party, which a man cannot put; the communication between the two is wholly without reserve; the person of the one is given up to the other, as completely as her own is under her command. This never can be the case with a man-operator; for, after all that can be said or done, the native feeling of women, in whatever rank of life, will, in these cases, restrain them from saying and doing, before a man, even before a husband, many things which they ought to say and do. So that, perhaps, even with regard to the bare question of comparative safety to life, the midwife is the preferable person.

238. But safety to life is not ALL. The preservation of life is not to be preferred to EVERY THING. Ought not a man to prefer death to the commission of treason against his country? Ought not a man to die, rather than save his life by the prostitution of his wife to a tyrant, who insists upon the one or the other? Every man and every woman will answer in the affirmative to both these questions. There are, then, cases where people ought to submit to certain death. Surely, then, the mere chance, the mere possibility of it, ought not to outweigh the mighty considerations on the other side; ought not to overcome that inborn modesty, that sacred reserve as to their persons, which, as I said before, is the charm of charms of the female sex, and which our mothers, rude as they are called by us, took, we may be satisfied, the best and most effectual means of preserving.

239. But is there, after all, any thing real in this greater security for the life of either mother or child? If, then, risk were so great as to call upon women to overcome this natural repugnance to suffer the approaches of a man, that risk must be general; it must apply to all women; and, further, it must, ever since the creation of man, always have so applied. Now, resorting to the employment of men-operators has not been in vogue in Europe more than about seventy years, and has not been general in England more than about thirty or forty years. So that the risk in employing midwives must, of late years, have become vastly greater than it was even when I was a boy, or the whole race must have been extinguished long ago. And, then, how puzzled we should be to account for the building of all the cathedrals, and all the churches, and the draining of all the marshes, and all the fens, more than a thousand years before the word 'accoucheur' ever came from the lips of woman, and before the thought came into her mind? And here, even in the use of this word, we have a specimen of the refined delicacy of the present age; here we have, varnish the matter over how we may, modesty in the word and grossness in the thought. Farmers' wives, daughters, and maids, cannot now allude to, or hear named, without blushing, those affairs of the homestead, which they, within my memory, used to talk about as freely as of milking or spinning; but, have they become more really modest than their mothers were? Has this refinement made them more continent than those rude mothers? A jury at Westminster gave, about six years ago, damages to a man, calling himself a gentleman, against a farmer, because the latter, for the purpose for which such animals are kept, had a bull in his yard, on which the windows of the gentleman looked! The plaintiff alleged, that this was so offensive to his wife and daughters, that, if the defendant were not compelled to desist, he should be obliged to brick up his windows, or to quit the house! If I had been the father of these, at once, delicate and curious daughters, I would not have been the herald of their purity of mind; and if I had been the suitor of one of them, I would have taken care to give up the suit with all convenient speed; for how could I reasonably have hoped ever to be able to prevail on delicacy, so exquisite, to commit itself to a pair of bridal sheets? In spite, however, of all this 'refinement in the human mind,' which is everlastingly dinned in our ears; in spite of the 'small-clothes,' and of all the other affected stuff, we have this conclusion, this indubitable proof, of the falling off in real delicacy; namely, that common prostitutes, formerly unknown, now swarm in our towns, and are seldom wanting even in our villages; and where there was one illegitimate child (including those coming before the time) only fifty years ago, there are now twenty.

240. And who can say how far the employment of men, in the cases alluded to, may have assisted in producing this change, so disgraceful to the present age, and so injurious to the female sex? The prostitution and the swarms of illegitimate children have a natural and inevitable tendency to lessen that respect, and that kind and indulgent feeling, which is due from all men to virtuous women. It is well known that the unworthy members of any profession, calling, or rank in life, cause, by their acts, the whole body to sink in the general esteem; it is well known, that the habitual dishonesty of merchants trading abroad, the habitual profligate behaviour of travellers from home, the frequent proofs of abject submission to tyrants; it is well known, that these may give the character of dishonesty, profligacy, or cowardice, to a whole nation. There are, doubtless, many men in Switzerland, who abhor the infamous practices of men selling themselves, by whole regiments, to fight for any foreign state that will pay them, no matter in what cause, and no matter whether against their own parents or brethren; but the censure falls upon the whole nation: and 'no money, no Swiss,' is a proverb throughout the world. It is, amidst those scenes of prostitution and bastardy, impossible for men in general to respect the female sex to the degree that they formerly did; while numbers will be apt to adopt the unjust sentiment of the old bachelor, POPE, that 'every woman is, at heart, a rake.'

241. Who knows, I say, in what degree the employment of men-operators may have tended to produce this change, so injurious to the female sex? Aye, and to encourage unfeeling and brutal men to propose that the dead bodies of females, if poor, should be sold for the purpose of exhibition and dissection before an audience of men; a proposition that our 'rude ancestors' would have answered, not by words, but by blows! Alas! our women may talk of 'small-clothes' as long as they please; they may blush to scarlet at hearing animals designated by their sexual appellations; it may, to give the world a proof of our excessive modesty and delicacy, even pass a law (indeed we have done it) to punish 'an exposure of the person'; but as long as our streets swarm with prostitutes, our asylums and private houses with bastards; as long as we have man-operators in the delicate cases alluded to, and as long as the exhibiting of the dead body of a virtuous female before an audience of men shall not be punished by the law, and even with death; as long as we shall appear to be satisfied in this state of things, it becomes us, at any rate, to be silent about purity of mind, improvement of manners, and an increase of refinement and delicacy.

242. This practice has brought the 'doctor' into every family in the kingdom, which is of itself no small evil. I am not thinking of the expense; for, in cases like these, nothing in that way ought to be spared. If necessary to the safety of his wife, a man ought not only to part with his last shilling, but to pledge his future labour. But we all know that there are imaginary ailments, many of which are absolutely created by the habit of talking with or about the 'doctor.' Read the 'DOMESTIC MEDICINE,' and by the time that you have done, you will imagine that you have, at times, all the diseases of which it treats. This practice has added to, has doubled, aye, has augmented, I verily believe, ten-fold the number of the gentlemen who are, in common parlance, called 'doctors'; at which, indeed, I, on my own private account, ought to rejoice; for, invariably I have, even in the worst of times, found them every where amongst my staunchest and kindest friends. But though these gentlemen are not to blame for this, any more than attorneys are for their increase in number; and amongst these gentlemen, too, I have, with very few exceptions, always found sensible men and zealous friends; though the parties pursuing these professions are not to blame; though the increase of attorneys has arisen from the endless number and the complexity of the laws, and from the ten-fold mass of crimes caused by poverty arising from oppressive taxation; and though the increase of 'doctors' has arisen from the diseases and the imaginary ailments arising from that effeminate luxury which has been created by the drawing of wealth from the many, and giving it to the few; and, as the lower classes will always endeavour to imitate the higher, so the 'accoucheur' has, along with the 'small-clothes,' descended from the loan-monger's palace down to the hovel of the pauper, there to take his fee out of the poor-rates; though these parties are not to blame, the thing is not less an evil. Both professions have lost in character, in proportion to the increase in the number of its members; peaches, if they grew on hedges, would rank but little above the berries of the bramble.

243. But to return once more to the matter of risk of life; can it be that nature has so ordered it, that, as a general thing, the life of either mother or child shall be in danger, even if there were no attendant at all? Can this be? Certainly it cannot: safety must be the rule, and danger the exception; this must be the case, or the world never could have been peopled; and, perhaps, in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, if nature were left wholly to herself, all would be right. The great doctor in these cases, is, comforting, consoling, cheering up. And who can perform this office like women? who have for these occasions a language and sentiments which seem to have been invented for the purpose; and be they what they may as to general demeanour and character, they have all, upon these occasions, one common feeling, and that so amiable, so excellent, as to admit of no adequate description. They completely forget, for the time, all rivalships, all squabbles, all animosities, all hatred even; every one feels as if it were her own particular concern.

244. These, we may be well assured, are the proper attendants on these occasions; the mother, the aunt, the sister, the cousin, and female neighbour; these are the suitable attendants, having some experienced woman to afford extraordinary aid, if such be necessary; and in the few cases where the preservation of life demands the surgeon's skill, he is always at hand. The contrary practice, which we got from the French, is not, however, so general in France as in England. We have outstripped all the world in this, as we have in every thing which proceeds from luxury and effeminacy on the one hand, and from poverty on the other; the millions have been stripped of their means to heap wealth on the thousands, and have been corrupted in manners, as well as in morals, by vicious examples set them by the possessors of that wealth. As reason says that the practice of which I complain cannot be cured without a total change in society, it would be presumption in me to expect such cure from any efforts of mine. I therefore must content myself with hoping that such change will come, and with declaring, that if I had to live my life over again, I would act upon the opinions which I have thought it my bounden duty here to state and endeavour to maintain.

245. Having gotten over these thorny places as quickly as possible, I gladly come back to the BABIES; with regard to whom I shall have no prejudices, no affectation, no false pride, no sham fears to encounter; every heart (except there be one made of flint) being with me here. 'Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' A figure most forcibly expressive of the character and beauty of innocence, and, at the same time, most aptly illustrative of the doctrine of regeneration. And where is the man; the woman who is not fond of babies is not worthy the name; but where is the man who does not feel his heart softened; who does not feel himself become gentler; who does not lose all the hardness of his temper; when, in any way, for any purpose, or by any body, an appeal is made to him in behalf of these so helpless and so perfectly innocent little creatures?

246. SHAKSPEARE, who is cried up as the great interpreter of the human heart, has said, that the man in whose soul there is no music, or love of music, is 'fit for murders, treasons, stratagems, and spoils.' 'Our immortal bard,' as the profligate SHERIDAN used to call him in public, while he laughed at him in private; our 'immortal bard' seems to have forgotten that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were flung into the fiery furnace (made seven times hotter than usual) amidst the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music; he seems to have forgotten that it was a music and a dance-loving damsel that chose, as a recompense for her elegant performance, the bloody head of John the Baptist, brought to her in a charger; he seems to have forgotten that, while Rome burned, Nero fiddled: he did not know, perhaps, that cannibals always dance and sing while their victims are roasting; but he might have known, and he must have known, that England's greatest tyrant, Henry VIII., had, as his agent in blood, Thomas Cromwell, expressed it, 'his sweet soul enwrapped in the celestial sounds of music;' and this was just at the time when the ferocious tyrant was ordering Catholics and Protestants to be tied back to back on the same hurdle, dragged to Smithfield on that hurdle, and there tied to, and burnt from, the same stake. Shakspeare must have known these things, for he lived immediately after their date; and if he had lived in our day, he would have seen instances enough of 'sweet souls' enwrapped in the same manner, and capable, if not of deeds equally bloody, of others, discovering a total want of feeling for sufferings not unfrequently occasioned by their own wanton waste, and waste arising, too, in part, from their taste for these 'celestial sounds.'

247. O no! the heart of man is not to be known by this test: a great fondness for music is a mark of great weakness, great vacuity of mind: not of hardness of heart; not of vice; not of downright folly; but of a want of capacity, or inclination, for sober thought. This is not always the case: accidental circumstances almost force the taste upon people: but, generally speaking, it is a preference of sound to sense. But the man, and especially the father, who is not fond of babies; who does not feel his heart softened when he touches their almost boneless limbs; when he sees their little eyes first begin to discern; when he hears their tender accents; the man whose heart does not beat truly to this test, is, to say the best of him, an object of compassion.

248. But the mother's feelings are here to be thought of too; for, of all gratifications, the very greatest that a mother can receive, is notice taken of, and praise bestowed on, her baby. The moment that gets into her arms, every thing else diminishes in value, the father only excepted. Her own personal charms, notwithstanding all that men say and have written on the subject, become, at most, a secondary object as soon as the baby arrives. A saying of the old, profligate King of Prussia is frequently quoted in proof of the truth of the maxim, that a woman will forgive any thing but calling her ugly; a very true maxim, perhaps, as applied to prostitutes, whether in high or low life; but a pretty long life of observation has told me, that a mother, worthy of the name, will care little about what you say of her person, so that you will but extol the beauty of her baby. Her baby is always the very prettiest that ever was born! It is always an eighth wonder of the world! And thus it ought to be, or there would be a want of that wondrous attachment to it which is necessary to bear her up through all those cares and pains and toils inseparable from the preservation of its life and health.

249. It is, however, of the part which the husband has to act, in participating in these cares and toils, that I am now to speak. Let no man imagine that the world will despise him for helping to take care of his own child: thoughtless fools may attempt to ridicule; the unfeeling few may join in the attempt; but all, whose good opinion is worth having, will applaud his conduct, and will, in many cases, be disposed to repose confidence in him on that very account. To say of a man, that he is fond of his family, is, of itself, to say that, in private life at least, he is a good and trust-worthy man; aye, and in public life too, pretty much; for it is no easy matter to separate the two characters; and it is naturally concluded, that he who has been flagrantly wanting in feeling for his own flesh and blood, will not be very sensitive towards the rest of mankind. There is nothing more amiable, nothing more delightful to behold, than a young man especially taking part in the work of nursing the children; and how often have I admired this in the labouring men in Hampshire! It is, indeed, generally the same all over England; and as to America, it would be deemed brutal for a man not to take his full share of these cares and labours.

250. The man who is to gain a living by his labour, must be drawn away from home, or, at least, from the cradle-side, in order to perform that labour; but this will not, if he be made of good stuff, prevent him from doing his share of the duty due to his children. There are still many hours in the twenty-four, that he will have to spare for this duty; and there ought to be no toils, no watchings, no breaking of rest, imposed by this duty, of which he ought not to perform his full share, and that, too, without grudging. This is strictly due from him in payment for the pleasures of the marriage state. What right has he to the sole possession of a woman's person; what right to a husband's vast authority; what right to the honourable title and the boundless power of father: what right has he to all, or any of these, unless he can found his claim on the faithful performance of all the duties which these titles imply?

251. One great source of the unhappiness amongst mankind arises, however, from a neglect of these duties; but, as if by way of compensation for their privations, they are much more duly performed by the poor than by the rich. The fashion of the labouring people is this: the husband, when free from his toil in the fields, takes his share in the nursing, which he manifestly looks upon as a sort of reward for his labour. However distant from his cottage, his heart is always at that home towards which he is carried, at night, by limbs that feel not their weariness, being urged on by a heart anticipating the welcome of those who attend him there. Those who have, as I so many hundreds of times have, seen the labourers in the woodland parts of Hampshire and Sussex, coming, at night-fall, towards their cottage-wickets, laden with fuel for a day or two; whoever has seen three or four little creatures looking out for the father's approach, running in to announce the glad tidings, and then scampering out to meet him, clinging round his knees, or hanging on his skirts; whoever has witnessed scenes like this, to witness which has formed one of the greatest delights of my life, will hesitate long before he prefer a life of ease to a life of labour; before he prefer a communication with children intercepted by servants and teachers to that communication which is here direct, and which admits not of any division of affection.

252. Then comes the Sunday; and, amongst all those who keep no servants, a great deal depends on the manner in which the father employs that day. When there are two or three children, or even one child, the first thing, after the breakfast (which is late on this day of rest), is to wash and dress the child or children. Then, while the mother is dressing the dinner, the father, being in his Sunday-clothes himself, takes care of the child or children. When dinner is over, the mother puts on her best; and then, all go to church, or, if that cannot be, whether from distance or other cause, all pass the afternoon together. This used to be the way of life amongst the labouring people; and from this way of life arose the most able and most moral people that the world ever saw, until grinding taxation took from them the means of obtaining a sufficiency of food and of raiment; plunged the whole, good and bad, into one indiscriminate mass, under the degrading and hateful name of paupers.

253. The working man, in whatever line, and whether in town or country, who spends his day of rest, or any part of it, except in case of absolute necessity, away from his wife and children, is not worthy of the name of father, and is seldom worthy of the trust of any employer. Such absence argues a want of fatherly and of conjugal affection, which want is generally duly repaid by a similar want in the neglected parties; and, though stern authority may command and enforce obedience for a while, the time soon comes when it will be set at defiance; and when such a father, having no example, no proofs of love, to plead, complains of filial ingratitude, the silent indifference of his neighbours, and which is more poignant, his own heart, will tell him that his complaint is unjust.

254. Thus far with regard to working people; but much more necessary is it to inculcate these principles in the minds of young men in the middle rank of life, and to be more particular, in their case, with regard to the care due to very young children, for here servants come in; and many are but too prone to think, that when they have handed their children over to well-paid and able servants, they have done their duty by them, than which there can hardly be a more mischievous error. The children of the poorer people are, in general, much fonder of their parents than those of the rich are of theirs: this fondness is reciprocal; and the cause is, that the children of the former have, from their very birth, had a greater share than those of the latter—of the personal attention, and of the never-ceasing endearments of their parents.

255. I have before urged upon young married men, in the middle walks of life, to keep the servants out of the house as long as possible; and when they must come at last, when they must be had even to assist in taking care of children, let them be assistants in the most strict sense of the word; let them not be confided in; let children never be left to them alone; and the younger the child, the more necessary a rigid adherence to this rule. I shall be told, perhaps, by some careless father, or some play-haunting mother, that female servants are women, and have the tender feelings of women. Very true; and, in general, as good and kind in their nature as the mother herself. But they are not the mothers of your children, and it is not in nature that they should have the care and anxiety adequate to the necessity of the case. Out of the immediate care and personal superintendence of one or the other of the parents, or of some trusty relation, no young child ought to be suffered to be, if there be, at whatever sacrifice of ease or of property, any possibility of preventing it: because, to insure, if possible, the perfect form, the straight limbs, the sound body, and the sane mind of your children, is the very first of all your duties. To provide fortunes for them; to make provision for their future fame; to give them the learning necessary to the calling for which you destine them: all these may be duties, and the last is a duty; but a duty far greater than, and prior to, all these, is the duty of neglecting nothing within your power to insure them a sane mind in a sound and undeformed body. And, good God! how many are the instances of deformed bodies, of crooked limbs, of idiocy, or of deplorable imbecility, proceeding solely from young children being left to the care of servants! One would imagine, that one single sight of this kind to be seen, or heard of, in a whole nation, would be sufficient to deter parents from the practice. And what, then, must those parents feel, who have brought this life-long sorrowing on themselves! When once the thing is done, to repent is unavailing. And what is now the worth of all the ease and all the pleasures, to enjoy which the poor sufferer was abandoned to the care of servants!

256. What! can I plead example, then, in support of this rigid precept? Did we, who have bred up a family of children, and have had servants during the greater part of the time, never leave a young child to the care of servants? Never; no, not for one single hour. Were we, then, tied constantly to the house with them? No; for we sometimes took them out; but one or the other of us was always with them, until, in succession, they were able to take good care of themselves; or until the elder ones were able to take care of the younger, and then they sometimes stood sentinel in our stead. How could we visit then? Why, if both went, we bargained beforehand to take the children with us; and if this were a thing not to be proposed, one of us went, and the other stayed at home, the latter being very frequently my lot. From this we never once deviated. We cast aside all consideration of convenience; all calculations of expense; all thoughts of pleasure of every sort. And, what could have equalled the reward that we have received for our care and for our unshaken resolution in this respect?

257. In the rearing of children, there is resolution wanting as well as tenderness. That parent is not truly affectionate who wants the courage to do that which is sure to give the child temporary pain. A great deal, in providing for the health and strength of children, depends upon their being duly and daily washed, when well, in cold water from head to foot. Their cries testify to what a degree they dislike this. They squall and kick and twist about at a fine rate; and many mothers, too many, neglect this, partly from reluctance to encounter the squalling, and partly, and much too often, from what I will not call idleness, but to which I cannot apply a milder term than neglect. Well and duly performed, it is an hour's good tight work; for, besides the bodily labour, which is not very slight when the child gets to be five or six months old, there is the singing to overpower the voice of the child. The moment the stripping of the child used to begin, the singing used to begin, and the latter never ceased till the former had ceased. After having heard this go on with all my children, ROUSSEAU taught me the philosophy of it. I happened, by accident, to look into his EMILE, and there I found him saying, that the nurse subdued the voice of the child and made it quiet, by drowning its voice in hers, and thereby making it perceive that it could not be heard, and that to continue to cry was of no avail. 'Here, Nancy,' said I (going to her with the book in my hand), 'you have been a great philosopher all your life, without either of us knowing it.' A silent nurse is a poor soul. It is a great disadvantage to the child, if the mother be of a very silent, placid, quiet turn. The singing, the talking to, the tossing and rolling about, that mothers in general practise, are very beneficial to the children: they give them exercise, awaken their attention, animate them, and rouse them to action. It is very bad to have a child even carried about by a dull, inanimate, silent servant, who will never talk, sing or chirrup to it; who will but just carry it about, always kept in the same attitude, and seeing and hearing nothing to give it life and spirit. It requires nothing but a dull creature like this, and the washing and dressing left to her, to give a child the rickets, and make it, instead of being a strong straight person, tup-shinned, bow-kneed, or hump-backed; besides other ailments not visible to the eye. By-and-by, when the deformity begins to appear, the doctor is called in, but it is too late: the mischief is done; and a few months of neglect are punished by a life of mortification and sorrow, not wholly unaccompanied with shame.

258. It is, therefore, a very spurious kind of tenderness that prevents a mother from doing the things which, though disagreeable to the child, are so necessary to its lasting well-being. The washing daily in the morning is a great thing; cold water winter or summer, and this never left to a servant, who has not, in such a case, either the patience or the courage that is necessary for the task. When the washing is over, and the child dressed in its day-clothes, how gay and cheerful it looks! The exercise gives it appetite, and then disposes it to rest; and it sucks and sleeps and grows, the delight of all eyes, and particularly those of the parents. 'I can't bear that squalling!' I have heard men say; and to which I answer, that 'I can't bear such men!' There are, I thank God, very few of them; for, if they do not always reason about the matter, honest nature teaches them to be considerate and indulgent towards little creatures so innocent and so helpless and so unconscious of what they do. And the noise: after all, why should it disturb a man? He knows the exact cause of it: he knows that it is the unavoidable consequence of a great good to his child, and of course to him: it lasts but an hour, and the recompense instantly comes in the looks of the rosy child, and in the new hopes which every look excites. It never disturbed me, and my occupation was one of those most liable to disturbance by noise. Many a score papers have I written amidst the noise of children, and in my whole life never bade them be still. When they grew up to be big enough to gallop about the house, I have, in wet weather, when they could not go out, written the whole day amidst noise that would have made some authors half mad. It never annoyed me at all. But a Scotch piper, whom an old lady, who lived beside us at Brompton, used to pay to come and play a long tune every day, I was obliged to bribe into a breach of contract. That which you are pleased with, however noisy, does not disturb you. That which is indifferent to you has not more effect. The rattle of coaches, the clapper of a mill, the fall of water, leave your mind undisturbed. But the sound of the pipe, awakening the idea of the lazy life of the piper, better paid than the labouring man, drew the mind aside from its pursuit; and, as it really was a nuisance, occasioned by the money of my neighbour, I thought myself justified in abating it by the same sort of means.

259. The cradle is in poor families necessary; because necessity compels the mother to get as much time as she can for her work, and a child can rock the cradle. At first we had a cradle; and I rocked the cradle, in great part, during the time that I was writing my first work, that famous MAÎTRE D'ANGLAIS, which has long been the first book in Europe, as well as in America, for teaching of French people the English language. But we left off the use of the cradle as soon as possible. It causes sleep more, and oftener, than necessary: it saves trouble; but to take trouble was our duty. After the second child, we had no cradle, however difficult at first to do without it. When I was not at my business, it was generally my affair to put the child to sleep: sometimes by sitting with it in my arms, and sometimes by lying down on a bed with it, till it fell asleep. We soon found the good of this method. The children did not sleep so much, but they slept more soundly. The cradle produces a sort of dosing, or dreaming sleep. This is a matter of great importance, as every thing must be that has any influence on the health of children. The poor must use the cradle, at least until they have other children big enough to hold the baby, and to put it to sleep; and it is truly wonderful at how early an age they, either girls or boys, will do this business faithfully and well. You see them in the lanes, and on the skirts of woods and commons, lugging a baby about, when it sometimes weighs half as much as the nurse. The poor mother is frequently compelled, in order to help to get bread for her children, to go to a distance from home, and leave the group, baby and all, to take care of the house and of themselves, the eldest of four or five, not, perhaps, above six or seven years old; and it is quite surprising, that, considering the millions of instances in which this is done in England, in the course of a year, so very, very few accidents or injuries arise from the practice; and not a hundredth part so many as arise in the comparatively few instances in which children are left to the care of servants. In summer time you see these little groups rolling about up the green, or amongst the heath, not far from the cottage, and at a mile, perhaps, from any other dwelling, the dog their only protector. And what fine and straight and healthy and fearless and acute persons they become! It used to be remarked in Philadelphia, when I lived there, that there was not a single man of any eminence, whether doctor, lawyer, merchant, trader, or any thing else, that had not been born and bred in the country, and of parents in a low state of life. Examine London, and you will find it much about the same. From this very childhood they are from necessity entrusted with the care of something valuable. They practically learn to think, and to calculate as to consequences. They are thus taught to remember things; and it is quite surprising what memories they have, and how scrupulously a little carter-boy will deliver half-a-dozen messages, each of a different purport from the rest, to as many persons, all the messages committed to him at one and the same time, and he not knowing one letter of the alphabet from another. When I want to remember something, and am out in the field, and cannot write it down, I say to one of the men, or boys, come to me at such a time, and tell me so and so. He is sure to do it; and I therefore look upon the memorandum as written down. One of these children, boy or girl, is much more worthy of being entrusted with the care of a baby, any body's baby, than a servant-maid with curled locks and with eyes rolling about for admirers. The locks and the rolling eyes, very nice, and, for aught I know, very proper things in themselves; but incompatible with the care of your baby, Ma'am; her mind being absorbed in contemplating the interesting circumstances which are to precede her having a sweet baby of her own; and a sweeter than yours, if you please, Ma'am; or, at least, such will be her anticipations. And this is all right enough; it is natural that she should think and feel thus; and knowing this, you are admonished that it is your bounden duty not to delegate this sacred trust to any body.

260. The courage, of which I have spoken, so necessary in the case of washing the children in spite of their screaming remonstrances, is, if possible, more necessary in cases of illness, requiring the application of medicine, or of surgical means of cure. Here the heart is put to the test indeed! Here is anguish to be endured by a mother, who has to force down the nauseous physic, or to apply the tormenting plaster! Yet it is the mother, or the father, and more properly the former, who is to perform this duty of exquisite pain. To no nurse, to no hireling, to no alien hand, ought, if possible to avoid it, this task to be committed. I do not admire those mothers who are too tender-hearted to inflict this pain on their children, and who, therefore, leave it to be inflicted by others. Give me the mother who, while the tears stream down her face, has the resolution scrupulously to execute, with her own hands, the doctor's commands. Will a servant, will any hireling, do this? Committed to such hands, the least trouble will be preferred to the greater: the thing will, in general, not be half done; and if done, the suffering from such hands is far greater in the mind of the child than if it came from the hands of the mother. In this case, above all others, there ought to be no delegation of the parental office. Here life or limb is at stake; and the parent, man or woman, who, in any one point, can neglect his or her duty here, is unworthy of the name of parent. And here, as in all the other instances, where goodness in the parents towards the children gives such weight to their advice when the children grow up, what a motive to filial gratitude! The children who are old enough to deserve and remember, will witness this proof of love and self-devotion in their mother. Each of them feels that she has done the same towards them all; and they love her and admire and revere her accordingly.

261. This is the place to state my opinions, and the result of my experience, with regard to that fearful disease the SMALL-POX; a subject, too, to which I have paid great attention. I was always, from the very first mention of the thing, opposed to the Cow-Pox scheme. If efficacious in preventing the Small-Pox, I objected to it merely on the score of its beastliness. There are some things, surely, more hideous than death, and more resolutely to be avoided; at any rate, more to be avoided than the mere risk of suffering death. And, amongst other things, I always reckoned that of a parent causing the blood, and the diseased blood too, of a beast to be put into the veins of human beings, and those beings the children of that parent. I, therefore, as will be seen in the pages of the Register of that day, most strenuously opposed the giving of twenty thousand pounds to JENNER out of the taxes, paid in great part by the working people, which I deemed and asserted to be a scandalous waste of the public money.

262. I contended, that this beastly application could not, in nature, be efficacious in preventing the Small-Pox; and that, even if efficacious for that purpose, it was wholly unnecessary. The truth of the former of these assertions has now been proved in thousands upon thousands of instances. For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was boldly and brazenly asserted. This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds. Speedily sprang up the 'ROYAL Jennerian Institution,' and Branch Institutions, issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising and enlightened generation with the beastly matter. 'Gentlemen and Ladies' made the commodity a pocket-companion; and if a cottager's child (in Hampshire at least), even seen by them, on a common, were not pretty quick in taking to its heels, it had to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow. One would have thought, that one-half of the cows in England must have been tapped to get at such a quantity of the stuff.

263. In the midst of all this mad work, to which the doctors, after having found it in vain to resist, had yielded, the real small-pox, in its worst form, broke out in the town of RINGWOOD, in HAMPSHIRE, and carried off, I believe (I have not the account at hand), more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the cow-pox 'so nicely!' And what was now said? Was the quackery exploded, and were the granters of the twenty thousand pounds ashamed of what they had done? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskilful operators; to the staleness of the matter; to its not being of the genuine quality. Admitting all this, the scheme stood condemned; for the great advantages held forth were, that any body might perform the operation, and that the matter was every where abundant and cost-free. But these were paltry excuses; the mere shuffles of quackery; for what do we know now? Why, that in hundreds of instances, persons cow-poxed by JENNER HIMSELF, have taken the real small-pox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder, or narrowly escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances, the parties concerned being living and well-known, one of them to the whole nation, and the other to a very numerous circle in the higher walks of life. The first is Sir RICHARD PHILLIPS, so well known by his able writings, and equally well known by his exemplary conduct as Sheriff of London, and by his life-long labours in the cause of real charity and humanity. Sir Richard had, I think, two sons, whose veins were impregnated by the grantee himself. At any rate he had one, who had, several years after Jenner had given him the insuring matter, a very hard struggle for his life, under the hands of the good, old-fashioned, seam-giving, and dimple-dipping small-pox. The second is PHILIP CODD, Esq., formerly of Kensington, and now of Rumsted Court, near Maidstone, in Kent, who has a son that had a very narrow escape under the real small-pox, about four years ago, and who also had been cow-poxed by Jenner himself. This last-mentioned gentleman I have known, and most sincerely respected, from the time of our both being about eighteen years of age. When the young gentleman, of whom I am now speaking, was very young, I having him upon my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent mother, whether he had been inoculated. 'Oh, no!' said she, 'we are going to have him vaccinated.' Whereupon I, going into the garden to the father, said, 'I do hope, Codd, that you are not going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.' 'Why,' said he, 'you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by Jenner himself.' What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine.

264. Now, here are instances enough; but, every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught the small-pox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other 'vaccinated' youths who did the same, at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that the cow-pox has been proved to be no guarantee against the small-pox, it makes it' milder' when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp, or on the seas), it will be 'milder!' It was not too mild to kill at RINGWOOD; and its mildness, in case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it from blinding him for a suitable number of days. I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of the father and mother upon this occasion; both of them the best of parents, and both of them now punished for having yielded to this fashionable quackery. I will not say, justly punished; for affection for their children, in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents should be under the influence of reason and experience, as well as under that of affection; and now, at any rate, they ought to set this really dangerous quackery at nought.

265. And, what does my own experience say on the other side? There are my seven children, the sons as tall, or nearly so, as their father, and the daughters as tall as their mother; all, in due succession, inoculated with the good old-fashioned face-tearing small-pox; neither of them with a single mark of that disease on their skins; neither of them having been, that we could perceive, ill for a single hour, in consequence of the inoculation. When we were in the United States, we observed that the Americans were never marked with the small-pox; or, if such a thing were seen, it was very rarely. The cause we found to be, the universal practice of having the children inoculated at the breast, and, generally, at a month or six weeks old. When we came to have children, we did the same. I believe that some of ours have been a few months old when the operation has been performed, but always while at the breast, and as early as possible after the expiration of six weeks from the birth; sometimes put off a little while by some slight disorder in the child, or on account of some circumstance or other; but, with these exceptions, done at, or before, the end of six weeks from the birth, and always at the breast. All is then pure: there is nothing in either body or mind to favour the natural fury of the disease. We always took particular care about the source from which the infectious matter came. We employed medical men, in whom we could place perfect confidence: we had their solemn word for the matter coming from some healthy child; and, at last, we had sometimes to wait for this, the cow-affair having rendered patients of this sort rather rare.

266. While the child has the small-pox, the mother should abstain from food and drink, which she may require at other times, but which might be too gross just now. To suckle a hearty child requires good living; for, besides that this is necessary to the mother, it is also necessary to the child. A little forbearance, just at this time, is prudent; making the diet as simple as possible, and avoiding all violent agitation either of the body or the spirits; avoiding too, if you can, very hot or very cold weather.

267. There is now, however, this inconvenience, that the far greater part of the present young women have been be-Jennered; so that they may catch the beauty-killing disease from their babies! To hearten them up, however, and more especially, I confess, to record a trait of maternal affection and of female heroism, which I have never heard of any thing to surpass, I have the pride to say, that my wife had eight children inoculated at her breast, and never had the small-pox in her life. I, at first, objected to the inoculating of the child, but she insisted upon it, and with so much pertinacity that I gave way, on condition that she would be inoculated too. This was done with three or four of the children, I think, she always being reluctant to have it done, saying that it looked like distrusting the goodness of God. There was, to be sure, very little in this argument; but the long experience wore away the alarm; and there she is now, having had eight children hanging at her breast with that desolating disease in them, and she never having been affected by it from first to last. All her children knew, of course, the risk that she voluntarily incurred for them. They all have this indubitable proof, that she valued their lives above her own; and is it in nature, that they should ever wilfully do any thing to wound the heart of that mother; and must not her bright example have great effect on their character and conduct! Now, my opinion is, that the far greater part of English or American women, if placed in the above circumstances, would do just the same thing; and I do hope, that those, who have yet to be mothers, will seriously think of putting an end, as they have the power to do, to the disgraceful and dangerous quackery, the evils of which I have so fully proved.

268. But there is, in the management of babies, something besides life, health, strength and beauty; and something too, without which all these put together are nothing worth; and that is sanity of mind. There are, owing to various causes, some who are born ideots; but a great many more become insane from the misconduct, or neglect, of parents; and, generally, from the children being committed to the care of servants. I knew, in Pennsylvania, a child, as fine, and as sprightly, and as intelligent a child as ever was born, made an ideot for life by being, when about three years old, shut into a dark closet, by a maid servant, in order to terrify it into silence. The thoughtless creature first menaced it with sending it to 'the bad place,' as the phrase is there; and, at last, to reduce it to silence, put it into the closet, shut the door, and went out of the room. She went back, in a few minutes, and found the child in a fit. It recovered from that, but was for life an ideot. When the parents, who had been out two days and two nights on a visit of pleasure, came home, they were told that the child had had a fit; but, they were not told the cause. The girl, however, who was a neighbour's daughter, being on her death-bed about ten years afterwards, could not die in peace without sending for the mother of the child (now become a young man) and asking forgiveness of her. The mother herself was, however, the greatest offender of the two: a whole lifetime of sorrow and of mortification was a punishment too light for her and her husband. Thousands upon thousands of human beings have been deprived of their senses by these and similar means.

269. It is not long since that we read, in the newspapers, of a child being absolutely killed, at Birmingham, I think it was, by being thus frightened. The parents had gone out into what is called an evening party. The servants, naturally enough, had their party at home; and the mistress, who, by some unexpected accident, had been brought home at an early hour, finding the parlour full of company, ran up stairs to see about her child, about two or three years old. She found it with its eyes open, but fixed; touching it, she found it inanimate. The doctor was sent for in vain: it was quite dead. The maid affected to know nothing of the cause; but some one of the parties assembled discovered, pinned up to the curtains of the bed, a horrid figure, made up partly of a frightful mask! This, as the wretched girl confessed, had been done to keep the child quiet, while she was with her company below. When one reflects on the anguish that the poor little thing must have endured, before the life was quite frightened out of it, one can find no terms sufficiently strong to express the abhorrence due to the perpetrator of this crime, which was, in fact, a cruel murder; and, if it was beyond the reach of the law, it was so and is so, because, as in the cases of parricide, the law, in making no provision for punishment peculiarly severe, has, out of respect to human nature, supposed such crimes to be impossible. But if the girl was criminal; if death, or a life of remorse, was her due, what was the due of her parents, and especially of the mother! And what was the due of the father, who suffered that mother, and who, perhaps, tempted her to neglect her most sacred duty!

270. If this poor child had been deprived of its mental faculties, instead of being deprived of its life, the cause would, in all likelihood, never have been discovered. The insanity would have been ascribed to 'brain-fever,' or to some other of the usual causes of insanity; or, as in thousands upon thousands of instances, to some unaccountable cause. When I was, in No. IX., paragraphs from 227 to 233, both inclusive, maintaining with all my might, the unalienable right of the child to the milk of its mother, I omitted, amongst the evils arising from banishing the child from the mother's breast, to mention, or, rather, it had never occurred to me to mention, the loss of reason to the poor, innocent creatures, thus banished. And now, as connected with this measure, I have an argument of experience, enough to terrify every young man and woman upon earth from the thought of committing this offence against nature. I wrote No. IX. at CAMBRIDGE, on Sunday, the 28th of March; and before I quitted SHREWSBURY, on the 14th of May, the following facts reached my ears. A very respectable tradesman, who, with his wife, have led a most industrious life, in a town that it is not necessary to name, said to a gentleman that told it to me: 'I wish to God I had read No. IX. of Mr. Cobbett's ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN fifteen years ago!' He then related, that he had had ten children, all put out to be suckled, in consequence of the necessity of his having the mother's assistance to carry on his business; and that two out of the ten had come home ideots; though the rest were all sane, and though insanity had never been known in the family of either father or mother! These parents, whom I myself saw, are very clever people, and the wife singularly industrious and expert in her affairs.

271. Now the motive, in this case, unquestionably was good; it was that the mother's valuable time might, as much as possible, be devoted to the earning of a competence for her children. But, alas! what is this competence to these two unfortunate beings! And what is the competence to the rest, when put in the scale against the mortification that they must, all their lives, suffer on account of the insanity of their brother and sister, exciting, as it must, in all their circle, and even in themselves, suspicions of their own perfect soundness of mind! When weighed against this consideration, what is all the wealth in the world! And as to the parents, where are they to find compensation for such a calamity, embittered additionally, too, by the reflection, that it was in their power to prevent it, and that nature, with loud voice, cried out to them to prevent it! MONEY! Wealth acquired in consequence of this banishment of these poor children; these victims of this, I will not call it avarice, but over-eager love of gain! wealth, thus acquired! What wealth can console these parents for the loss of reason in these children! Where is the father and the mother, who would not rather see their children ploughing in other men's fields, and sweeping other men's houses, than led about parks or houses of their own, objects of pity even of the menials procured by their wealth?

272. If what I have now said be not sufficient to deter a man from suffering any consideration, no matter what, to induce him to delegate the care of his children, when very young, to any body whomsoever, nothing that I can say can possibly have that effect; and I will, therefore, now proceed to offer my advice with regard to the management of children when they get beyond the danger of being crazed or killed by nurses or servants.

273. We here come to the subject of education in the true sense of that word, which is rearing up, seeing that the word comes from the Latin educo, which means to breed up, or to rear up. I shall, afterwards, have to speak of education in the now common acceptation of the word, which makes it mean, book-learning. At present, I am to speak of education in its true sense, as the French (who, as well as we, take the word from the Latin) always use it. They, in their agricultural works, talk of the 'éducation du Cochon, de l'Alouette, &c.,' that is of the hog, the lark, and so of other animals; that is to say, of the manner of breeding them, or rearing them up, from their being little things till they be of full size.

274. The first thing, in the rearing of children, who have passed from the baby-state, is, as to the body, plenty of good food; and, as to the mind, constant good example in the parents. Of the latter I shall speak more by-and-by. With regard to the former, it is of the greatest importance, that children be well fed; and there never was a greater error than to believe that they do not need good food. Every one knows, that to have fine horses, the colts must be kept well, and that it is the same with regard to all animals of every sort and kind. The fine horses and cattle and sheep all come from the rich pastures. To have them fine, it is not sufficient that they have plenty of food when young, but that they have rich food. Were there no land, no pasture, in England, but such as is found in Middlesex, Essex, and Surrey, we should see none of those coach-horses and dray-horses, whose height and size make us stare. It is the keep when young that makes the fine animal.

275. There is no other reason for the people in the American States being generally so much taller and stronger than the people in England are. Their forefathers went, for the greater part, from England. In the four Northern States they went wholly from England, and then, on their landing, they founded a new London, a new Falmouth, a new Plymouth, a new Portsmouth, a new Dover, a new Yarmouth, a new Lynn, a new Boston, and a new Hull, and the country itself they called, and their descendants still call, NEW ENGLAND. This country of the best and boldest seamen, and of the most moral and happy people in the world, is also the country of the tallest and ablest-bodied men in the world. And why? Because, from their very birth, they have an abundance of good food; not only of food, but of rich food. Even when the child is at the breast, a strip of beef-stake, or something of that description, as big and as long as one's finger, is put into its hand. When a baby gets a thing in its hand, the first thing it does is to poke some part of it into its mouth. It cannot bite the meat, but its gums squeeze out the juice. When it has done with the breast, it eats meat constantly twice, if not thrice, a day. And this abundance of good food is the cause, to be sure, of the superior size and strength of the people of that country.

276. Nor is this, in any point of view, an unimportant matter. A tall man is, whether as labourer, carpenter, bricklayer, soldier or sailor, or almost anything else, worth more than a short man: he can look over a higher thing; he can reach higher and wider; he can move on from place to place faster; in mowing grass or corn he takes a wider swarth, in pitching he wants a shorter prong; in making buildings he does not so soon want a ladder or a scaffold; in fighting he keeps his body farther from the point of his sword. To be sure, a man may be tall and weak; but, this is the exception and not the rule: height and weight and strength, in men as in speechless animals, generally go together. Aye, and in enterprise and courage too, the powers of the body have a great deal to do. Doubtless there are, have been, and always will be, great numbers of small and enterprizing and brave men; but it is not in nature, that, generally speaking, those who are conscious of their inferiority in point of bodily strength, should possess the boldness of those who have a contrary description.

277. To what but this difference in the size and strength of the opposing combatants are we to ascribe the ever-to-be-blushed-at events of our last war against the United States! The hearts of our seamen and soldiers were as good as those of the Yankees: on both sides they had sprung from the same stock: on both sides equally well supplied with all the materials of war: if on either side, the superior skill was on ours: French, Dutch, Spaniards, all had confessed our superior prowess: yet, when, with our whole undivided strength, and to that strength adding the flush and pride of victory and conquest, crowned even in the capital of France; when, with all these tremendous advantages, and with all the nations of the earth looking on, we came foot to foot and yard-arm to yard-arm with the Americans, the result was such as an English pen refuses to describe. What, then, was the great cause of this result, which filled us with shame and the world with astonishment? Not the want of courage in our men. There were, indeed, some moral causes at work; but the main cause was, the great superiority of size and of bodily strength on the part of the enemy's soldiers and sailors. It was so many men on each side; but it was men of a different size and strength; and, on the side of the foe, men accustomed to daring enterprise from a consciousness of that strength.

278. Why are abstinence and fasting enjoined by the Catholic Church? Why, to make men humble, meek, and tame; and they have this effect too: this is visible in whole nations as well as in individuals. So that good food, and plenty of it, is not more necessary to the forming of a stout and able body than to the forming of an active and enterprizing spirit. Poor food, short allowance, while they check the growth of the child's body, check also the daring of the mind; and, therefore, the starving or pinching system ought to be avoided by all means. Children should eat often, and as much as they like at a time. They will, if at full heap, never take, of plain food, more than it is good for them to take. They may, indeed, be stuffed with cakes and sweet things till they be ill, and, indeed, until they bring on dangerous disorders: but, of meat plainly and well cooked, and of bread, they will never swallow the tenth part of an ounce more than it is necessary for them to swallow. Ripe fruit, or cooked fruit, if no sweetening take place, will never hurt them; but, when they once get a taste for sugary stuff, and to cram down loads of garden vegetables; when ices, creams, tarts, raisins, almonds, all the endless pamperings come, the doctor must soon follow with his drugs. The blowing out of the bodies of children with tea, coffee, soup, or warm liquids of any kind, is very bad: these have an effect precisely like that which is produced by feeding young rabbits, or pigs, or other young animals upon watery vegetables: it makes them big-bellied and bare-boned at the same time; and it effectually prevents the frame from becoming strong. Children in health want no drink other than skim milk, or butter-milk, or whey; and, if none of those be at hand, water will do very well, provided they have plenty of good meat. Cheese and butter do very well for part of the day. Puddings and pies; but always without sugar, which, say what people will about the wholesomeness of it, is not only of no use in the rearing of children, but injurious: it forces an appetite: like strong drink, it makes daily encroachments on the taste: it wheedles down that which the stomach does not want: it finally produces illness: it is one of the curses of the country; for it, by taking off the bitter of the tea and coffee, is the great cause of sending down into the stomach those quantities of warm water by which the body is debilitated and deformed and the mind enfeebled. I am addressing myself to persons in the middle walk of life; but no parent can be sure that his child will not be compelled to labour hard for its daily bread: and then, how vast is the difference between one who has been pampered with sweets and one who has been reared on plain food and simple drink!

279. The next thing after good and plentiful and plain food is good air. This is not within the reach of every one; but, to obtain it is worth great sacrifices in other respects. We know that there are smells which will cause instant death; we know, that there are others which will cause death in a few years; and, therefore, we know that it is the duty of parents to provide, if possible, against this danger to the health of their offspring. To be sure, when a man is so situated that he cannot give his children sweet air without putting himself into a jail for debt: when, in short, he has the dire choice of sickly children, children with big heads, small limbs, and ricketty joints: or children sent to the poor-house: when this is his hard lot, he must decide for the former sad alternative: but before he will convince me that this is his lot, he must prove to me, that he and his wife expend not a penny in the decoration of their persons; that on his table, morning, noon, or night, nothing ever comes that is not the produce of English soil; that of his time not one hour is wasted in what is called pleasure; that down his throat not one drop or morsel ever goes, unless necessary to sustain life and health. How many scores and how many hundreds of men have I seen; how many thousands could I go and point out, to-morrow, in London, the money expended on whose guzzlings in porter, grog and wine, would keep, and keep well, in the country, a considerable part of the year, a wife surrounded by healthy children, instead of being stewed up in some alley, or back room, with a parcel of poor creatures about her, whom she, though their fond mother, is almost ashamed to call hers! Compared with the life of such a woman, that of the labourer, however poor, is paradise. Tell me not of the necessity of providing money for them, even if you waste not a farthing: you can provide them with no money equal in value to health and straight limbs and good looks: these it is, if within your power, your bounden duty to provide for them: as to providing them with money, you deceive yourself; it is your own avarice, or vanity, that you are seeking to gratify, and not to ensure the good of your children. Their most precious possession is health and strength; and you have no right to run the risk of depriving them of these for the sake of heaping together money to bestow on them: you have the desire to see them rich: it is to gratify yourself that you act in such a case; and you, however you may deceive yourself, are guilty of injustice towards them. You would be ashamed to see them without fortune; but not at all ashamed to see them without straight limbs, without colour in their cheeks, without strength, without activity, and with only half their due portion of reason.

280. Besides sweet air, children want exercise. Even when they are babies in arms, they want tossing and pulling about, and want talking and singing to. They should be put upon their feet by slow degrees, according to the strength of their legs; and this is a matter which a good mother will attend to with incessant care. If they appear to be likely to squint, she will, always when they wake up, and frequently in the day, take care to present some pleasing object right before, and never on the side of their face. If they appear, when they begin to talk, to indicate a propensity to stammer, she will stop them, repeat the word or words slowly herself, and get them to do the same. These precautions are amongst the most sacred of the duties of parents; for, remember, the deformity is for life; a thought which will fill every good parent's heart with solicitude. All swaddling and tight covering are mischievous. They produce distortions of some sort or other. To let children creep and roll about till they get upon their legs of themselves is a very good way. I never saw a native American with crooked limbs or hump-back, and never heard any man say that he had seen one. And the reason is, doubtless, the loose dress in which children, from the moment of their birth, are kept, the good food that they always have, and the sweet air that they breathe in consequence of the absence of all dread of poverty on the part of the parents.

281. As to bodily exercise, they will, when they begin to get about, take, if you let them alone, just as much of it as nature bids them, and no more. That is a pretty deal, indeed, if they be in health; and, it is your duty, now, to provide for their taking of that exercise, when they begin to be what are called boys and girls, in a way that shall tend to give them the greatest degree of pleasure, accompanied with the smallest risk of pain: in other words, to make their lives as pleasant as you possibly can. I have always admired the sentiment of ROUSSEAU upon this subject. 'The boy dies, perhaps, at the age of ten or twelve. Of what use, then, all the restraints, all the privations, all the pain, that you have inflicted upon him? He falls, and leaves your mind to brood over the possibility of your having abridged a life so dear to you.' I do not recollect the very words; but the passage made a deep impression upon my mind, just at the time, too, when I was about to become a father; and I was resolved never to bring upon myself remorse from such a cause; a resolution from which no importunities, coming from what quarter they might, ever induced me, in one single instance, or for one single moment, to depart. I was resolved to forego all the means of making money, all the means of living in any thing like fashion, all the means of obtaining fame or distinction, to give up every thing, to become a common labourer, rather than make my children lead a life of restraint and rebuke; I could not be sure that my children would love me as they loved their own lives; but I was, at any rate, resolved to deserve such love at their hands; and, in possession of that, I felt that I could set calamity, of whatever description, at defiance.

282. Now, proceeding to relate what was, in this respect, my line of conduct, I am not pretending that every man, and particularly every man living in a town, can, in all respects, do as I did in the rearing up of children. But, in many respects, any man may, whatever may be his state of life. For I did not lead an idle life; I had to work constantly for the means of living; my occupation required unremitted attention; I had nothing but my labour to rely on; and I had no friend, to whom, in case of need, I could fly for assistance: I always saw the possibility, and even the probability, of being totally ruined by the hand of power; but, happen what would, I was resolved, that, as long as I could cause them to do it, my children should lead happy lives; and happy lives they did lead, if ever children did in this whole world.

283. The first thing that I did, when the fourth child had come, was to get into the country, and so far as to render a going backward and forward to London, at short intervals, quite out of the question. Thus was health, the greatest of all things, provided for, as far as I was able to make the provision. Next, my being always at home was secured as far as possible; always with them to set an example of early rising, sobriety, and application to something or other. Children, and especially boys, will have some out-of-door pursuits; and it was my duty to lead them to choose such pursuits as combined future utility with present innocence. Each his flower-bed, little garden, plantation of trees; rabbits, dogs, asses, horses, pheasants and hares; hoes, spades, whips, guns; always some object of lively interest, and as much earnestness and bustle about the various objects as if our living had solely depended upon them. I made everything give way to the great object of making their lives happy and innocent. I did not know what they might be in time, or what might be my lot; but I was resolved not to be the cause of their being unhappy then, let what might become of us afterwards. I was, as I am, of opinion, that it is injurious to the mind to press book-learning upon it at an early age: I always felt pain for poor little things, set up, before 'company,' to repeat verses, or bits of plays, at six or eight years old. I have sometimes not known which way to look, when a mother (and, too often, a father), whom I could not but respect on account of her fondness for her child, has forced the feeble-voiced eighth wonder of the world, to stand with its little hand stretched out, spouting the soliloquy of Hamlet, or some such thing. I remember, on one occasion, a little pale-faced creature, only five years old, was brought in, after the feeding part of the dinner was over, first to take his regular half-glass of vintner's brewings, commonly called wine, and then to treat us to a display of his wonderful genius. The subject was a speech of a robust and bold youth, in a Scotch play, the title of which I have forgotten, but the speech began with, 'My name is Norval: on the Grampian Hills my father fed his flocks...' And this in a voice so weak and distressing as to put me in mind of the plaintive squeaking of little pigs when the sow is lying on them. As we were going home (one of my boys and I) he, after a silence of half a mile perhaps, rode up close to the side of my horse, and said, 'Papa, where be the Grampian Hills?' 'Oh,' said I, 'they are in Scotland; poor, barren, beggarly places, covered with heath and rushes, ten times as barren as Sherril Heath.' 'But,' said he, 'how could that little boy's father feed his flocks there, then?' I was ready to tumble off the horse with laughing.

284. I do not know any thing much more distressing to the spectators than exhibitions of this sort. Every one feels, not for the child, for it is insensible to the uneasiness it excites, but for the parents, whose amiable fondness displays itself in this ridiculous manner. Upon these occasions, no one knows what to say, or whither to direct his looks. The parents, and especially the fond mother, looks sharply round for the so-evidently merited applause, as an actor of the name of MUNDEN, whom I recollect thirty years ago, used, when he had treated us to a witty shrug of his shoulders, or twist of his chin, to turn his face up to the gallery for the clap. If I had to declare on my oath which have been the most disagreeable moments of my life, I verily believe, that, after due consideration, I should fix upon those, in which parents, whom I have respected, have made me endure exhibitions like these; for, this is your choice, to be insincere, or to give offence.