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 from crime.

These benefits have already accrued to civilised men, because they
have lately allowed a very few of their number peaceably to imitate
Mr. Rarey, and find out what nature--or rather, to speak at once
reverently and accurately, He who made nature--is thinking of, and
obey the "voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam." This science has
done, while yet in her infancy. What she will do in her maturity,
who dar