To change the sweet privilege of childhood into weary days and restless nights,—­to darken its pure associations, which for many are the sole light that ever brings them back from sin and despair to the heaven of their infancy,—­to banish those reveries of innocent fancy which even noisy boyhood knows, and which are the appointed guardians of its purity before conscience wakes,—­to abolish its moments of priceless idleness, saturated with sunshine, blissful, aimless moments, when every angel is near,—­to bring insanity, once the terrible prerogative of maturer life, down into the summer region of childhood, with blight and ruin;—­all this is the work of our folly, Dolorosus, of our miserable ambition to have our unconscious little ones begin, in their very infancy, the race of desperate ambition, which has, we admit, exhausted prematurely the lives of their parents.

The worst danger of it is, that the moral is written at the end of the fable, not the beginning.  The organization in youth is so dangerously elastic, that the result of these intellectual excesses is not seen until years after.  When some young girl incurs spinal disease for life from some slight fall which she ought not to have felt for an hour, or some businessman breaks down in the prime of his years from some trifling over-anxiety which should have left no trace behind, the popular verdict may be, “Mysterious Providence”; but the wiser observer sees the retribution for the folly of those misspent days which enfeebled the childish constitution, instead of ripening it.  One of the most admirable passages in the Report of Dr. Ray, already mentioned, is that in which he explains, that, though hard study at school is rarely the immediate cause of insanity, it is the most frequent of its ulterior causes, except hereditary tendencies.  “It diminishes the conservative power of the animal economy to such a degree, that attacks of disease, which otherwise would have passed off safely, destroy life almost before danger is anticipated.  Every intelligent physician understands, that, other things being equal, the chances of recovery are far less in the studious, highly intellectual child than in one of an opposite description.  The immediate mischief may have seemed slight, but the brain is left in a condition of peculiar impressibility, which renders it morbidly sensitive to every adverse influence.”

Indeed, here is precisely the weakness of our whole national training thus far,—­brilliant immediate results, instead of wise delays.  The life of the average American is a very hasty breakfast, a magnificent luncheon, a dyspeptic dinner, and no supper.  Our masculine energy is like our feminine beauty, bright and evanescent.  As enthusiastic travellers inform us that there are in every American village a dozen, girls of sixteen who are prettier than any English hamlet of the same size can produce, so the same village undoubtedly possesses a dozen very young men who, tried by the same standard, are “smarter” than their English peers.  Come again fifteen years after, when the Englishmen and Englishwomen are reported to be just in their prime, and, lo! those lovely girls are sallow old women, and the boys are worn-out men,—­with fire left in them, it may be, but fuel gone,—­retired from active business, very likely, and just waiting for consumption to carry them off, as one waits for the omnibus.