is account
perhaps that four-tenths of them die under five years of age. They should
also consider the bearing of the body upon the mind and morals of their
children. How often do ignorant and indolent parents, by giving their
children over to the care of sickly and immoral nurses, ruin forever the
health and souls of their offspring. Much, then, depends upon the physical
nurture of your child. If you would not injure its mind and soul, you must
nurse its body with tender care and wisdom. A vital bond unites them; they
reciprocally influence each other, and hence what affects the one must have
a corresponding influence upon the other. Neglect the body of your child;
destroy its health either by extreme and fastidious care, or by a brutal
neglect, and you at the same time do lasting injury to its mind and morals;
for the body as the vehicle of mind and spirit, is used for spiritual ends,
and should, therefore, be nurtured with direct reference to these.

Your child, in the nursery, is like the tender plant. The storm of passion
and the chill of indifference and the oppression of parental tyranny should
not be heard and felt there; for where the storm rages and coldness freezes
and the hand of cruelty oppresses, we can have no beautiful and vigorous
development of physical or moral powers. There will be a stinted and
one-sided growth. At best it will be dwarfish, and tend to counteract the
spontaneous outflow of mental and moral life. The tender plant, when,
cramped and clogged by existing impediments, cannot spring up into
beauteous maturity. Neither can your child, when crammed with sweetmeats,
and oppressed and screwed into monstrous contortions by the cruel
inquisition of fashion and fashionable garments.

In this way the misdirected love and cruel pride of mothers often destroy
the health and beauty of their children. They cause a sickly and dwarfish
growth by too much confinement and mental taxation, by a too rigid choice
of diet, by daily, uncalled for decoctions of medicine, and by fitting the
body in a dress as the Chinese do their children's feet in shoes; in a
word, by making the entire nursery life too artificial, and substituting
the laws of art for those of nature. The result must be a delicate,
artificial constitution, too fragile for the trials and duties of life. The
body of your child has not the blooming, blushing form of nature, but the
cold marble cast of a statue; and it imprints itself upon the dispo