I am sure that we have all had the same experience.  How exciting it was, last year, to be sure, to see Angelina at the grammar-school examination, multiplying mentally 351,426 by 236,145, and announcing the result in two minutes and thirteen seconds as 82,987,492,770!  I remember how you stood trembling as she staggered under the monstrous load, and how your cheek hung out the red flag of parental exultation when she can out safe.  But when I looked at her colorless visage, sharp features, and shiny consumptive skin, I groaned inwardly.  It seemed as if that crop of figures, like the innumerable florets of the whiteweed, now overspreading your paternal farm, were exhausting the last vitality from a shallow soil.  What a pity it is that the Deity gave to these children of ours bodies as well as brains!  How it interferes with thorough instruction in the languages and the sciences!  You remember the negro-trader in “Uncle Tom,” who sighs for a lot of negroes specially constructed for his convenience, with the souls left out?  Could not some of our school-committees take measures to secure the companion set, possessing merely the brains, and with the troublesome bodies conveniently omitted?

The truth is, that we Americans, having overcome all other obstacles to universal education of the people, have thought to overcome even the limitations imposed by the laws of Nature; and so we were going triumphantly on, when the ruined health of our children suddenly brought us to a stand.  Now we suddenly discover, that, in the absence of Inquisitions, and other unpleasant Old-World tortures, our school-houses have taken their place.  We have outgrown war, we think; and yet we have not outgrown a form of contest which is undeniably more sanguinary, since one-half the community actually die, under present arrangements, before they are old enough to see a battle-field,—­that is, before the age of eighteen.  It is an actual fact, that, if you can only keep Angelina alive up to that birthday, even if she be an ignoramus, she will at least have accomplished the feat of surviving half her contemporaries.  Can there be no Peace Society to check this terrific carnage?  Dolorosus, rather than have a child of mine die, as I have recently heard of a child’s dying, insane from sheer overwork, and raving of algebra, I would have her come no nearer to the splendors of science than the man in the French play, who brings away from school only the general impression that two and two make five for a creditor and three for a debtor.

De Quincey wrote a treatise on “Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,” and it is certainly the fine art which receives most attention in our schools.  “So far as the body is concerned,” said Horace Mann of these institutions, “they provide for all the natural tendencies to physical ease and inactivity as carefully as though paleness and languor, muscular enervation and debility, were held to be constituent elements in national beauty.”