Often the fondly futile questions fall from the anxious lips of maternal foreboding:  What has the future in store for me?  Will my child live?  Will providence grant me this long-sought blessing?  A thousand such thoughts continually assail the heart in a mother’s intense solicitude; but not in vain will her hopes be set, if haply, she may reverently follow the course of Mother Nature’s laws and precepts, into which I will endeavor to give you some insight.

Every thinking man must shudder to find it recorded in statistical tables how insane asylums and prisons are overflowing, how suicides and crimes against life and soul are but common incidents.  It is not hard for each one of us to see the demon of greed and avarice in the eyes of those we meet, ready and eager to snatch away the very bread from the lips of his fellow man because he, too, is hungry and lacking life’s necessities.  The egotism of mankind grows constantly stronger; all are in haste to become rich, that thus they may enjoy life before its little span is spent.  What has become of the youths exuberant in strength, who once were wont to set out, all jubilant with song, in their heyday of freedom, to revel in nature and bathe their lungs in its balsamic atmosphere—­to return strengthened to their sleep at early evening, and who really sought to retain their health?  They who were the pride of their parents, the joy of their sisters, the blissful hope of a waiting bride.  Can we recognize such in the average youth of today,—­the citizen of the tomorrow—­these effigies of men, degraded by the demons of alcohol and nicotine, by the gambling passion, and by the company of loose women, into dissipated dissolute invalids unwholesome in themselves and a menace to the race?

Let us pass on rather to the gentler sex.

Where are the sprightly, modest maidens with cheeks rosy with healthy blood, graceful in figure with well developed forms—­the chaste, pure spirit shining in their eyes, with witchery and common sense combined?  Where are the fathers and mothers whose good fortune it is to possess such children as these?  Can it be that they should deem these caricatures of fashion worthy of their fond desire?—­these whose days are spent in idling, who find their pleasure in the streets, the shops, the theatres and the like they term “society?”

Those men are old at forty years.

Those youths too often die at twenty, dissipated wrecks, holding as a mere ceremony the marriage they expect eventually to consummate; or married, now and then produce a single child that had far better never have been born.

What of those mothers who cannot nourish their own offspring, but fain would make shift with all imaginable unnatural substitutes and bring up children in whom a predisposition to disease has already been born?

Oh nature!  High and mighty mistress!  A bitter penalty dost thou exact from these thine erring progeny.