Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/169

Rh results, and latterly to still stranger disputes concerning the propriety of acknowledging the failure, and the best way of compromising the consequences; but such controversies could often be simplified by tracing the effects to their causes. Ill-founded buildings are naturally shaky. Still, people dislike to be lectured on the chronic dilapidation of their parlor-walls. But he who succeeds in exposing the rottenness of the foundation-timbers will need no specious arguments to demonstrate the expediency of removing the household goods to a safer place.

For many centuries the training of the young was almost monopolized by the propagandists of that most terrible of all delusions, the natural-depravity dogma, and our whole system of practical education is-still interwoven with the following fallacies, all more or less deeply-rooted upshots of that dogma:

—From the moment a child is born, he is treated on the principle that all his instincts are essentially wrong, that Nature must be thwarted and counteracted in every possible way. He is strapped up in a contrivance that he would be glad to exchange for a strait-jacket, kept for hours in a position that prevents him from moving any limb of his body. His first attempts at locomotion are checked; he is put in leading-strings, he is carefully guarded from the out-door world, from the air that would invigorate his lungs, from the sports that would develop his muscles. Hence, the peevishness, awkwardness, and sickliness of our young aristocrats. Poor people have no time to imitate the absurdities of their wealthy neighbors, and their children profit by what the model nurse would undoubtedly call neglect. Indian babies are still better off. They are fed on bull-beef, and kicked around like young dogs; but they are not swaddled, they are not cradled, and not dosed with paregoric; they crawl around naked, and soon learn to keep out of the way; they are happy, they never cry. If we would treat our youngsters in the same way, only substituting kisses and bread for kicks and beef, they would be as happy as kids in a clover-field, and moreover they would afterward be hardier and stronger. Every week the newspapers tell us about ladies tumbling down-stairs and breaking both arms; boys falling from a fence and fracturing their collar-bones. From what height would a young Comanche have to fall to break such bones—not to mention South-Sea Island children and young monkeys? The bones of an infant are plastic: letting it tumble and roll about would harden the bony tissue; guarding it like a piece of brittle crockery makes its limbs as fragile as glass. Christian mothers reproach themselves with neglecting their duty to their children if they do not constantly interfere with their movements, but they forget that in points of physical education Nature herself is such an excellent teacher that the apparent neglect is really a transfer of the pupil to a more efficient school.