of the young energies around them, and older children are bored, and fretted, and deformed in figure and temper by the care of younger children.  This is horrible.  Some care and task and responsibility are good for a child’s own development; but every care, every toil, every atom of labor that is laid upon children beyond what is solely the best for their own character is intolerable and inexcusable oppression.  Parents have no right to lighten their own burdens by imposing them upon the children.  The poor things had nothing to do with being born.  They came into the world without any volition of their own.  Their existence began only to serve the pleasure or the pride of others.  It was a culpable cruelty, in the first place, to introduce them into a sphere where no adequate provision could be made for their comfort and culture; but to shoulder them, after they get here, with the load which belongs to their parents is outrageous.  Earth is not a paradise at best, and at worst it is very near the other place.  The least we can do is to make the way as smooth as possible for the new-comers.  There is not the least danger that it will be too smooth.  If you stagger under the weight which you have imprudently assumed, stagger.  But don’t be such an unutterable coward and brute as to illumine your own life by darkening the young lives which sprang from yours.  I often wonder that children do not open their mouths and curse the father that begat and the mother that bore them.  I often wonder that parents do not tremble lest the cry of the children whom they oppress go up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and bring down wrath upon their guilty heads.  It was well that God planted filial affection and reverence as an instinct in the human breast.  If it depended upon reason, it would have but a precarious existence.

I wish women would have the sense and courage—­I will not say, to say what they think, for that is not always desirable—­but to think according to the facts.  They have a strong desire to please men, which is quite right and natural; but in their eagerness to do this, they sometimes forget what is due to themselves.  To think namby-pambyism for the sake of pleasing men is running benevolence into the ground.  Not that women consciously do this, but they do it.  They don’t mean to pander to false masculine notions, but they do.  They don’t know that they are pandering to them, but they are.  Men say silly things, partly because they don’t know any better, and partly because they don’t want any better.  They are strong, and can generally make shift to bear their end of the pole without being crushed.  So they are tolerably content.  They are not very much to blame.  People cannot be expected to start on a crusade against ills of which they have but a vague and cloudy conception.  The edge does not cut them, and so they think it is not much of a sword after all.  But women have, or ought to have, a more subtile and intimate acquaintance