e_ three out of four in every person's
acquaintance.

I for one lift up my voice emphatically against the assertion, and do
affirm that I think childhood is the most mean and miserable portion of
human life, and I am thankful to be well out of it. I look upon it as
no better than a mitigated form of slavery. There is not a child in
the land that can call his soul, or his body, or his jacket his own. A
little soft lump of clay he comes into the world, and is moulded into a
vessel of honor or a vessel of dishonor long before he can put in a word
about the matter. He has no voice as to his education or his training,
what he shall eat, what he shall drink, or wherewithal he shall be
clothed. He has to wait upon the wisdom, the whims, and often the
wickedness of other people. Imagine, my six-foot friend, how you would
feel to be obliged to wear your woollen mittens when you desire to bloom
out in straw-colored kids, or to be buttoned into your black waistcoat
when your taste leads you to select your white, or to be forced under
your Kossuth hat when you had set your heart on your black beaver: yet
this is what children are perpetually called on to undergo. Their wills
are just as strong as ours and their tastes are stronger, yet they have
to bend the one and sacrifice the other; and they do it under pressure
of necessity. Their reason is not convinced; they are forced to yield to
superior power; and of all disagreeable things in the world, the most
disagreeable is not to have your own way. When you are grown up, you
wear a print frock because you cannot afford a silk, or because a silk
would be out of place,--you wear India-rubber overshoes because your
polished patent-leather would be ruined by the mud; and your self-denial
is amply compensated by the reflection of superior fitness or economy.
But a child has no such reflection to console him. He puts on his
battered, gray old shoes because you make him; he hangs up his new
trousers and goes back into his detestable girl's-frock because he will
be punished if he does not, and it is intolerable.

It is of no use to say that this is their discipline and is all
necessary to their welfare. I maintain that that is a horrible condition
of life in which such degrading _surveillance_ is necessary. You may
affirm that an absolute despotism is the only government fit for
Dahomey, and I may not disallow it; but when you go on and say that
Dahomey is the happiest country in the world,