option. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.

From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into
public life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders
of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies
of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutiveness
of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the
performance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with
burdens half their own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's
head seems a natural part of their childish ego.

An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive.
That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another
proves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity
of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the
consequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up
to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned
whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the same principle
that a runner who has less distance to travel not only accomplishes his
course quicker, but moves with relatively greater speed, or as a small
planet grows old not simply sooner, but comparatively faster than a
larger one. Jupiter is still in his fiery youth, while the moon is
senile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence began
long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormally
early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career of
inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of
the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future
possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her
charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now
on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested
spectator of the proceedings.

As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered
to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life
consists of attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears
to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by
the comparative importance attached to precepts on the subject in the
respective moral codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe
of the Mosaic law, while the same injunction constitutes at least one
half of the Confucian precepts. To the C