But if we must sit, be it ever so short a time, our seats should always have backs; and those which are designed for children, should not be so high as to render them uncomfortable.  Nor should the backs of seats be so high as they usually are, either for children or adults.  They should never come much higher than the middle of the body.  If they reach the shoulders, they either favor a crouching forward, or interfere with the free action of the lungs.

This might be deemed a proper place for saying something on the position of children in manufactories.  But here a world of abuse opens upon my view, the full development of which demands a large volume.  How many crooked spines, emaciated bodies, decaying lungs, as well as scrofulas, fevers, and consumptions, are either induced or accelerated by these unnatural employments!  I mean they are unnatural for the young.  As to employing adults in them, I have nothing at present to say.  But when I think of the cruel custom of placing children in these places, whose bodies—­and were this the place, I might add, minds—­are immature, and especially girls, I am compelled, by the voice of conscience, and, as I trust, by a regard to those laws which God has established in our physical frames, but which are yet so strangely violated, to protest against it.  Better that no factories should exist, than that children should be ruined in them as they now are.  Better by far that we should return, were it possible, to the primitive habits of New England—­to those by-gone days when mothers and daughters made the wearing apparel of themselves and their families—­when, if there was less of intellectual cultivation, and less money expended for luxuries and extravagances, there was much more of health and happiness.

There is one more species of abuse to which, in closing, I wish to direct maternal attention.  I allude to injudicious modes of inflicting corporal punishment.

Let me not be understood to appear, in this place, as the advocate of bodily punishments of any kind; for if they are even admissible under some circumstances, I am fully convinced that in the way in which they are commonly administered, they do much more harm than good.

But leaving the question of their utility, in the abstract, wholly untouched, and taking it for granted, for the present, that they are—­as is undoubtedly the fact—­sometimes employed, and will continue to be so for a great while to come, I proceed to speak of their more flagrant abuses.

Among these, none are more reprehensible than blows of any kind on the head.  Even the rod is objectionable for this purpose, since it exposes the eyes.  But the hand—­in boxing the ears or striking in any way—­is more so.  The bones of the head, in young children, are not yet firmly knit together, and these concussions may injure the tender brain.  I know of whole families, whose mental faculties are dull, as the consequence—­I