d the sweetest recreation of the husband.
Thus the correction of this one abuse would soon result in a general
reform; nature would resume all her rights. When women are once more
true mothers, men will become true fathers and husbands.

If mothers are not real mothers, children are not real children toward
them. Their duties to one another are reciprocal, and if these be
badly fulfilled on the one side, they will be neglected on the other
side. The child ought to love his mother before he knows that it is
his duty to love her. If the voice of natural affection be not
strengthened by habit and by care, it will grow dumb even in childhood;
and thus the heart dies, so to speak, before it is born. Thus from the
outset we are beyond the pale of nature.

There is an opposite way by which a woman goes beyond it; that is,
when, instead of neglecting a mother's cares, she carries them to
excess; when she makes her child her idol. She increases and fosters
his weakness to prevent him from feeling it. Hoping to shelter him
from the laws of nature, she wards from him shocks of pain. She does
not consider how, for the sake of preserving him for a moment from some
inconveniences, she is heaping upon his head future accidents and
perils; nor how cruel is the caution which prolongs the weakness of
childhood in one who must bear the fatigues of a grown-up man. The
fable says that, to render her son invulnerable, Thetis plunged him
into the Styx. This allegory is beautiful and clear. The cruel
mothers of whom I am speaking do far otherwise; by plunging their
children into effeminacy they open their pores to ills of every kind,
to which, when grown up, they fall a certain prey.

Watch nature carefully, and follow the paths she traces out for you.
She gives children continual exercise; she strengthens their
constitution by ordeals of every kind; she teaches them early what pain
and trouble mean. The cutting of their teeth gives them fever, sharp
fits of colic throw them into convulsions, long coughing chokes them,
worms torment them, repletion corrupts their blood, different leavens
fermenting there cause dangerous eruptions. Nearly the whole of
infancy is sickness and danger; half the children born into the world
die before their eighth year. These trials past, the child has gained
strength, and as soon as he can use life, its principle becomes more
assured.

This is the law of nature. Why do you oppose her? Do you no