for incalculable opportunities of good and evil in our daily intercourse with every soul with whom we have to deal; every meeting, every parting, every chance greeting, and every appointed encounter, are occasions open to us for which we are to account.  To our children, our servants, our friends, our acquaintances,—­to each and all every day, and all day long, we are distributing that which is best or worst in existence,—­influence:  with every word, with every look, with every gesture, something is given or withheld of great importance it may be to the receiver, of inestimable importance to the giver.

Certainly the laws and enacted statutes on which this detestable system is built up are potent enough; the social prejudice that buttresses it is almost more potent still; and yet a few hearts and brains well bent to do the work, would bring within this almost impenetrable dungeon of ignorance, misery, and degradation, in which so many millions of human souls lie buried, that freedom of God which would presently conquer for them their earthly liberty.  With some such thoughts I commended the slaves on the plantation to the little overseer’s wife; I did not tell my thoughts to her, they would have scared the poor little woman half out of her senses.  To begin with, her bread, her husband’s occupation, has its root in slavery; it would be difficult for her to think as I do of it.  I am afraid her care, even of the bodily habits and sicknesses of the people left in Mrs. G——­’s charge, will not be worth much, for nobody treats others better than they do themselves; and she is certainly doing her best to injure herself and her own poor baby, who is two and a-half years old, and whom she is still suckling.

This is, I think, the worst case of this extraordinary delusion so prevalent among your women that I have ever met with yet; but they all nurse their children much longer than is good for either baby or mother.  The summer heat, particularly when a young baby is cutting teeth, is, I know, considered by young American mothers an exceedingly critical time, and therefore I always hear of babies being nursed till after the second summer; so that a child born in January would be suckled till it was eighteen or nineteen months old, in order that it might not be weaned till its second summer was over.  I am sure that nothing can be worse than this system, and I attribute much of the wretched ill health of young American mothers to over nursing; and of course a process that destroys their health and vigour completely must affect most unfavourably the child they are suckling.  It is a grievous mistake.  I remember my charming friend F——­ D——­ telling me that she had nursed her first child till her second was born—­a miraculous statement, which I can only believe because she told it me herself.  Whenever anything seems absolutely impossible, the word of a true person is the only proof of it worth anything.

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