nature, too powerful and too
seemingly capricious for them to conquer. She has discovered innumerable
remedies and alleviations for pains and disease. She has thrown such
light on the causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that the
presence of cholera--and probably of all zymotic diseases--in any place,
is usually a sin and a shame, for which the owners and authorities of
that place ought to be punishable by law, as destroyers of their fellow-
men; while for the weak, for those who, in the barbarous and
semi-barbarous state--and out of that last we are only just emerging--how
much has she done; an earnest of much more which she will do? She has
delivered the insane--I may say by the scientific insight of one man,
more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of those who earn
them--I mean the great and good Pinel--from hopeless misery and torture
into comparative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure.
For children, she has done much, or rather might do, would parents read
and perpend such books as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers on
physical education. We should not then see the children, even of the
rich, done to death piecemeal by improper food, improper clothes, neglect
of ventilation and the commonest measures for preserving health. We
should not see their intellects stunted by Procrustean attempts to teach
them all the same accomplishments, to the neglect, most often, of any
sound practical training of their faculties. We should not see slight
indigestion, or temporary rushes of blood to the head, condemned and
punished as sins against Him who took up little children in His arms and
blessed them.

But we may have hope. When we compare education now with what it was
even forty years ago, much more with the stupid brutality of the monastic
system, we may hail for children, as well as for grown people, the advent
of the reign of common sense.

And for woman--What might I not say on that point? But most of it would
be fitly discussed only among physicians and biologists: here I will say
only this--Science has exterminated, at least among civilised nations,
witch-manias. Women--at least white women--are no longer tortured or
burnt alive from man's blind fear of the unknown. If science had done no
more than that, she would deserve the perpetual thanks and the perpetual
trust, not only of the women whom she has preserved from agony, but the
men whom she has preserved f