Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/55

 is an indispensable condition of human dignity to the unmarried, is still more obligatory on the married.

That is the third point.

Fourthly, in our society—in which children are regarded as an impediment to enjoyment, or as an unlucky accident, or (if only a prearranged number are born) as a special kind of pleasure—what is considered in their training is not their preparation for the duties of life which await them as reasonable and loving beings, but merely the gratification they may afford to their parents. The result is that human children are brought up like the young of animals, and the chief care of the parents (encouraged by false medical science) is, not to prepare them for activities worthy of human beings, but to overfeed them, to increase their size, and to make them clean, white, well-conditioned and handsome. (If this is not the case among the lower classes, it is only because they cannot afford it. They look on the matter just as the upper classes do.)

And in these pampered children (as in all overfed animals) an overpowering sexual sensitiveness shows itself unnaturally early, causing them terrible distress as they approach the age of puberty. All the surroundings of their life: clothes, books, sight-seeing, music, dances, dainty fare—everything, from the pictures on their boxes of bon-bons to the stories, novels, and poems they read—more and more increases this sensitiveness, and, as a result, the most terrible sexual vices and diseases are frequent incidents in the life of children of both sexes, and often retain their hold after maturity is reached.

And I consider that this is wrong. And the conclusion to be drawn is that human children should not be brought up like the young of animals, but in the education of human children other results should be aimed at than producing handsome, well-kept bodies.

That is the fourth point.

Fifthly, in our society, where the falling in love of young men and women (which still has physical