s of their children in the charge of
these women, whose first lessons to them are lying and deceit. It
is a hideous system, and how hideous must that life called "pleasure"
be that can thus put aside love, reason, conscience, and break to
pieces a natural law so strong that in its purity it frequently
proves more powerful than the law of self-preservation. Writing on
this subject, Frederick James Grant, F. R. C. S., in his bold and
original book, "From Our Dead Selves," tells of a fashionable mother
who put her first child out to nurse, and who, when her second died
at birth and was brought to her bedside in its coffin, was entirely
interested--not in the child--but in the pretty lining and covering
of the coffin. For it is one of the startling facts of this condition
of motherhood that the poor infant left to some dreadful shrew, body
and soul, has the very best care taken of its frills and coats and of
the wraps in its baby carriage. For these things will be seen by other
people's servants and commented on, and are therefore worthy of
attention.

It is a strange state of society which tolerates this awful transfer
of duty, and society will have the bill to pay as well as the cruel
mother. These neglected children, whatever their birth, come really
from the dangerous classes, and have a likelihood to drift there. For
the first moral training of a child is the most important of all, and
in these cases it is given by women gross both through ignorance and
vice; whose relatives are very likely at the same time living in
suspicious localities, or in prison wards. And, naturally enough,
their first lessons to the children under them are to lie, to deceive,
to commit small pilferings, and not be found out. They are ordered not
to carry tales out of the nursery, or let mamma know what nurse does
not want known. Bad language, bad habits, hatred, petty conciliations,
meanness of every kind, are in the curriculum of any nursery left in
the care of the women usually found in them.

No one need imagine that the evil thus wrought can be eradicated in
future years by a higher class of teachers. The vicious seed is sown;
it is next to impossible to go through the field of a child's mind and
gather it up again. It has taken root, and unless it can be crowded
out by a nobler growth, the harvest is certain. The mother, then, who
prefers pleasure and society to her children, whom she hands over to
wicked and cruel nurses, is herself wi