Satisfied that my observations were accurate, and that everything contributing to husband the health, strength, beauty, and intelligence of the child, would likewise contribute to the beauty, happiness, and contentment of the adult, as well as his obedience to my laws, I resolved to occupy myself with what proved to be the very important subject of babies.  In meditating on the mode of obtaining the desired results, I considered nothing too insignificant,—­not even so “small” a thing as the scratch of a pin, sufficient at all events to make an infant cry.  The acts of crying and making wry faces disturb the lines of the plastic clay of the child’s countenance, and even the lines of the form.  The state of suffering calls off the vital electricity from its duties in other parts of the organisation, and is attended with other inconveniences, slight indeed in immediate perceptible effects, but so powerful in their cumulative and germinating effects as to lead to results which, were they related, would seem incredible.

I must content myself by saying, that although the march of these cumulative effects is not one-tenth as visible as the almost imperceptible movement of the hand that marks the seconds in one of our smallest electrical watches, they nevertheless eventually show in their result great and increasing evils, seriously affecting the child, the youth, the adult, and the man.  It would not be too much to say that the traces of an injury, however slight, are never altogether obliterated, whilst every successive injury and deprivation of force renders the sufferer more open to every new inroad.

Although the minute hand of our electric watches moves almost imperceptibly, marking minutes, hours, days, and years, it advances in measured, limited progression; whereas the effects of suffering on the child go on advancing in an increasing—­nay, multiplying—­ratio, by which, up to a certain point, that of geometrical progression is far exceeded.  If you can realise the fact, which in Montalluyah is incontestable, that even a scratch, however slight, will injure a child, it will require little stretch of imagination to form some conception at least of the injury caused to the beauty, form, health, strength, and mind of the adult, by the many diseases and sufferings which were allowed to leave their imprints on the young, impressionable clay and delicate organisation of the infant.  Our children were formerly afflicted, like yours, with diseases resembling whooping-cough, croup, measles, small-pox, and other maladies, forming an almost endless list, and although the child survived the attacks and the incidental suffering and waste, the evil consequences could never be effectually removed.