train them to such work as is worthy of men and women, but
to increase their weight, or add a cubit to their stature, to make them
spruce, sleek, well-fed, and comely. They rig them out in all manner of
fantastic costumes, wash them, over-feed them, and refuse to make them
work. If the children of the lower orders differ in this last respect
from those of the well-to-do classes, the difference is merely formal;
they work from sheer necessity, and not because their parents recognize
work as a duty. And in over-fed children, as in over-fed animals,
sensuality is engendered unnaturally early.

Fashionable dress to-day, the course of reading, plays, music, dances,
luscious food, all the elements of our modern life, in a word, from the
pictures on the little boxes of sweetmeats up to the novel, the tale,
and the poem, contribute to fan this sensuality into a strong, consuming
flame, with the result that sexual vices and diseases have come to be
the normal conditions of the period of tender youth, and often continue
into the riper age of full-blown manhood. And I am of opinion that this
is not right.

It is high time it ceased. The children of human beings should not be
brought up as if they were animals; and we should set up as the object
and strive to maintain as the result of our labors something better and
nobler than a well-dressed body. This is my fourth contention.

In the fifth place, I am of opinion that, owing to the exaggerated and
erroneous significance attributed by our society to love and to the
idealized states that accompany and succeed it, the best energies of our
men and women are drawn forth and exhausted during the most promising
period of life; those of the men in the work of looking for, choosing,
and winning the most desirable objects of love, for which purpose lying
and fraud are held to be quite excusable; those of the women and girls
in alluring men and decoying them into liaisons or marriage by the most
questionable means conceivable, as an instance of which the present
fashions in evening dress may be cited. I am of opinion that this is not
right.

The truth is, that the whole affair has been exalted by poets and
romancers to an undue importance, and that love in its various
developments is not a fitting object to consume the best energies of
men. People set it before them and strive after it, because their view
of life is as vulgar and brutish as is that other conception frequently
met with i