cts good. The child educated for his
position, and never leaving it, could not be exposed to the
inconveniences of another.

But seeing that human affairs are changeable, seeing the restless and
disturbing spirit of this century, which overturns everything once in a
generation, can a more senseless method be imagined than to educate a
child as if he were never to leave his room, as if he were obliged to
be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the poor creature takes
but one step on the earth, if he comes down so much as one stair, he is
ruined. This is not teaching him to endure pain; it is training him to
feel it more keenly.

We think only of preserving the child: this is not enough. We ought to
teach him to preserve himself when he is a man; to bear the blows of
fate; to brave both wealth and wretchedness; to live, if need be, among
the snows of Iceland or upon the burning rock of Malta. In vain you
take precautions against his dying,--he must die after all; and if his
death be not indeed the result of those very precautions, they are none
the less mistaken. It is less important to keep him from dying than it
is to teach him how to live. To live is not merely to breathe, it is
to act. It is to make use of our organs, of our senses, of our
faculties, of all the powers which bear witness to us of our own
existence. He who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most
years, but he who has been most truly conscious of what life is. A man
may have himself buried at the age of a hundred years, who died from
the hour of his birth. He would have gained something by going to his
grave in youth, if up to that time he had only lived.

The New-born Child.

The new-born child needs to stretch and to move his limbs so as to draw
them out of the torpor in which, rolled into a ball, they have so long
remained. We do stretch his limbs, it is true, but we prevent him from
moving them. We even constrain his head into a baby's cap. It seems
as if we were afraid he might appear to be alive. The inaction, the
constraint in which we keep his limbs, cannot fail to interfere with
the circulation of the blood and of the secretions, to prevent the
child from growing strong and sturdy, and to change his constitution.
In regions where these extravagant precautions are not taken, the men
are all large, strong, and well proportioned. Countries in which
children are swaddled swarm with hunchbacks, with cripples, wit