in maturity. Thus it is,
by unwise methods of control which appeal wholly to the spirit of
greed, emulation and selfishness in the child--the purely animal
instincts--with perhaps the occasional degrading influence of corporal
punishment, as a later development, that so many young lives are wrecked
and the downward path made easy which leads through duplicity to crime.
The infantile precosity of the age leaves little scope for the old-time
sentimental prudery of parents who fail to discriminate between
innocence and ignorance; but it has been stated by a well known American
authority on the subject of child-culture, whose experience of
child-life and schools is nation-wide, that only about one child in a
hundred receives proper instruction early enough to protect it from
vice. Then again there supervenes the evil of the competitive school
system which, too frequently, forces the education of a child beyond the
natural order of growth. Countless numbers of little ones are injured by
enforced premature development, thereby diverting the vital forces to
the development of the brain which should be devoted to the development
of the body.

Encompassed by such a chain of adverse circumstances as the combined
result of parental egotism and pedantic, pedagogical ignorance, is it
wonderful, I would ask, that the ghastly record of the hideous sacrifice
of child-life is what it is, and that the young lives which do by chance
escape the horrible holocaust, still reap the prevailing harvest of
prolific ills of which the coming explanation will give some adequate
conception.

Often the fondly futile questions fall from the anxious lips of maternal
foreboding: What has the future in store for me? Will my child live?
Will providence grant me this long-sought blessing? A thousand such
thoughts continually assail the heart in a mother's intense solicitude;
but not in vain will her hopes be set, if haply, she may reverently
follow the course of Mother Nature's laws and precepts, into which I
will endeavor to give you some insight.

Every thinking man must shudder to find it recorded in statistical
tables how insane asylums and prisons are overflowing, how suicides and
crimes against life and soul are but common incidents. It is not hard
for each one of us to see the demon of greed and avarice in the eyes of
those we meet, ready and eager to snatch away the very bread from the
lips of his fellow man because he, too, is hungry and lacki