, in
every case, proceed quite so far as to make the child a drunkard? If it
but lays the foundation of a constitutional fondness for _excitements_,
it tends to disease. Indeed that, in itself, is a disease; and one, too,
which is destroying more persons every year than the cholera, or even
the consumption. Consumption has at most only slain her tens of
thousands [Footnote: About 40,000 a year, in the United States, as nearly
as it can be estimated.] a year; but a fondness for exciting food and
drink--innocent and harmless as it is often supposed to be, and
therefore only the more dangerous a foe--does not fail to slay every
year, directly or indirectly, its hundreds of thousands. At least this
is my own opinion.

Why, where can you find the individual who is not a slave to this
perpetual rage within--this perpetual cry, "Who will show us any"
physical "good"? Who, in this land of abundance, will eat or drink plain
things? Who will eat simple bread, meat, potatoes, rice, pudding,
apples, &c. or drink simple water? A few instances may be found, of
late, in which people confine themselves to simple water for drink; but
they are rather rare. And no wonder. They _must_ be rare so long as an
unnatural thirst is kept up everywhere by the most exciting and most
strange mixtures of food. Where, I again ask, is the person who will eat
and relish plain bread, plain meat, plain puddings, &c.? Certainly not
in the nursery. No young mother--scarcely one I mean--will, for a single
meal, confine herself to a piece of bread, the sweetest and best food in
the whole world, unless it is hot, or toasted, or soaked, or buttered. A
natural, healthy appetite, is as rare a thing on our planet, almost, as
an inhabitant of the sun or moon.

I have seen more than one mother made sick by using, while nursing,
improper food and drink. I have known milk punch, taken by
stealth--(because how could the mother, it was said, ever have a supply
of food for her poor child without it!)--to kindle a fever that came
very near burning up the mother and child both. And yet, if I have once
or twice succeeded in convincing the mother that she was only suffering
the natural punishment of her own transgressions, I have never, so far
as I now recollect, succeeded in making her believe that her iniquities
were visited upon her unoffending infant.

There is everywhere the most painful apathy on this most painful
subject. We see little children of all ages, everywh