hindrances to success and happiness.  Are children doomed to a monotonous dietary, or a dietary that is deficient in nutritiveness?  Their ultimate physical power, and their efficiency as men and women, will inevitably be more or less diminished by it.  Are they forbidden vociferous play, or (being too ill-clothed to bear exposure) are they kept indoors in cold weather?  They are certain to fall below that measure of health and strength to which they would else have attained.  When sons and daughters grow up sickly and feeble, parents commonly regard the event as a misfortune—­as a visitation of Providence.  Thinking after the prevalent chaotic fashion, they assume that these evils come without causes; or that the causes are supernatural.  Nothing of the kind.  In some cases the causes are doubtless inherited; but in most cases foolish regulations are the causes.  Very generally, parents themselves are responsible for all this pain, this debility, this depression, this misery.  They have undertaken to control the lives of their offspring from hour to hour; with cruel carelessness they have neglected to learn anything about these vital processes which they are unceasingly affecting by their commands and prohibitions; in utter ignorance of the simplest physiologic laws, they have been year by year undermining the constitutions of their children; and have so inflicted disease and premature death, not only on them but on their descendants.

Equally great are the ignorance and the consequent injury, when we turn from physical training to moral training.  Consider the young mother and her nursery-legislation.  But a few years ago she was at school, where her memory was crammed with words, and names, and dates, and her reflective faculties scarcely in the slightest degree exercised—­where not one idea was given her respecting the methods of dealing with the opening mind of childhood; and where her discipline did not in the least fit her for thinking out methods of her own.  The intervening years have been passed in practising music, in fancy-work, in novel-reading, and in party-going:  no thought having yet been given to the grave responsibilities of maternity; and scarcely any of that solid intellectual culture obtained which would be some preparation for such responsibilities.  And now see her with an unfolding human character committed to her charge—­see her profoundly ignorant of the phenomena with which she has to deal, undertaking to do that which can be done but imperfectly even with the aid of the profoundest knowledge.  She knows nothing about the nature of the emotions, their order of evolution, their functions, or where use ends and abuse begins.  She is under the impression that some of the feelings are wholly bad, which is not true of any one of them; and that others are good however far they may be carried, which is also not true of any one of them.  And then, ignorant as she is of the structure she has to deal with, she is equally ignorant of the effects produced