The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78,
April, 1864, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864

Author: Various

Release Date: May 23, 2005 [EBook #15880]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOL. ***

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIII.--APRIL, 1864.--NO. LXXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

* * * * *

FIGHTING FACTS FOR FOGIES.

Young people are often charged with caring little for the past. The
charge is just; and the young are right. If they care little for the
past, then it is certain that it is in debt to them,--as for them the
past cared nothing. It is wonderful, considering how children used to be
treated, that the human race ever succeeded in getting established on
earth. Humanity should have died out, there was so little that was
humane in its bringing up. Because they had contrived to bring a
helpless creature into a world that every one wishes he had never known
at least twenty-four times a day, a father and mother of the very old
school indeed assumed that they had the right to make that creature a
slave, and to hold it in everlasting chains. They had much to say about
the duty of children, and very little about the love of parents. The
sacrificing of children to idols, a not uncommon practice in some
renowned countries of antiquity, the highest-born children being the
favorite victims,--for Moloch's appetite was delicate,--could never have
taken place in any country where the voice of Nature was heeded; and yet
those sacrifices were but so many proofs of the existence of a spirit of
pride, which caused men to offer up their offspring on the domestic
altar. Son and slave were almost the same word with the Romans; and your
genuine old Roman made little ado about cutt