It is as marvellous as true that some children survive this treatment;
besides the stuffing with meat victuals, candies, and cookies, inducing
colic and dysentery; then dosing with rhubarb, paregoric, peppermint, and
worse. Soothing syrups! Eternal quietuses! Yes, in spite of extremes of
heat and cold, stuffing and dosing with crude and poisonous articles, some
babies actually reach the next stage--youth!
From chilled blood, indigestion, poisonous air and drugs, repeated attacks
of croup, bronchitis, dysentery, etc., the majority who have reached
puberty are afflicted by some scrofulous taint, or development, or broken
constitutions.
Now, they have appetites and passions to grapple. We have already, in
chapter fifth, shown how the school-girl is cheated out of health by the
deprivation of her "rights," among which are air, freedom, and exercise.
Here is another evil, which must not be passed over unnoticed. A New York
physician, who wields an abler pen than myself, thus expresses my ideas.
What he applies to females is not limited by copyright. Males, help
yourselves; it belongs to you quite as much as to the beautiful.
"It sickens the heart to contemplate the education of female children in
this city." (And let me add, in this country.) "Should nature even triumph
over all the evils above enumerated, no sooner has the poor girl attained
the age of puberty, than her mind and nervous system are placed upon the
rack of novel-reading and sentimental love stories. There is just enough
of truth in some of these mawkish productions to excite the passions and
distract the attention of the young girl from the love of nature and its
teachings, and all rational ideas of real life, and to cause her to
despise the commonplace parents whose every hour may be occupied for her
consideration and welfare."
This writer goes on to condemn those selfish, money-grasping wretches
"professors of religion, too," in our city, who publish this impure and
overstrained literature, to the great injury of the morals of the young;
adding, "What language can be too strong for such disgusting hypocrisy? We
punish a poor wretch for the publication of an obscene book or print, and
give honor and preferment to those who instil poison into the minds of our
children by a book prepared with devilish ingenuity, and in every possible
style of attraction and excitement.
"It is the premature excitement of the nervous and sexual system that
should be avoided. The licentious characters presented in all the glowing
tints of a depraved imagination cannot fail to injuriously affect the
youthful organism."
The dissolute and immoral characters whom we debar from the personal
friendship of our sons and daughters, whom we exclude from our parlors,
and even street recognition, are sugared over, and, between gilded covers,
passed freely into the _boudoirs_, school-rooms, and seminaries of our
children, for their companionship at their leisure. The vile characters in
person would be far less injurious, for in that case their hideousness
would the surer be revealed.
"Nothing can be more certain than the production of these works of a
precocious evidence of puberty. The forces of the young heart and vascular
system are thus prematurely goaded into ephemeral action by the stimulus
of an imagination alternately moved to laughter, and tears, and sexual
passion."
Mr. Baxter, in Part 2, ch. xxi., direction 1, of his _Christian
Directory_, which is a direction for reading other books than the Bible,
says, "I pre-suppose that you keep the devil's books out of your hands and
house. I mean cards, and idle tales, and play-books, and romances or
love-books, and false, bewitching stories, and the seducting books of
false teachers.... For where these are suffered to corrupt the mind, all
grave and useful writings are forestalled; and it is a wonder to see how
powerfully these poison the minds of children, and many other empty
heads."
It would astonish and shame some parents if they would take pains to look
over the books which are daily and nightly perused by their children. It
is not enough for you to know that such books were obtained from a "dear
friend," or from a respectable publisher, or pious bookseller, or that
they are lawful publications. Parents and guardians, I pray you take
warning.
"OUR GIRLS."
I want everybody, male and female, old and young, to read that most
excellent book, "Our Girls," by Dr. Dio Lewis. It will do you good. For
humanity's sake, and particularly for the benefit of females, I recommend
it. Lest some of my readers should not follow this advice, I want to tell
you what it says about