Is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and temper?  Their first feeling is one of pain and suffering; they find every necessary movement hampered; more miserable than a galley slave, in vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry.  Their first words you say are tears.  That is so.  From birth you are always checking them, your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture.  Their voice alone is free; why should they not raise it in complaint?  They cry because you are hurting them; if you were swaddled you would cry louder still.

What is the origin of this senseless and unnatural custom?  Since mothers have despised their first duty and refused to nurse their own children, they have had to be entrusted to hired nurses.  Finding themselves the mothers of a stranger’s children, without the ties of nature, they have merely tried to save themselves trouble.  A child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled it is cast into a corner and its cries are unheeded.  So long as the nurse’s negligence escapes notice, so long as the nursling does not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a weakling for life.  Its limbs are kept safe at the expense of its body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse’s fault.

These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town.  Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages?  If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business.  Children have been found in this position purple in the face, their tightly bandaged chest forbade the circulation of the blood, and it went to the head; so the sufferer was considered very quiet because he had not strength to cry.  How long a child might survive under such conditions I do not know, but it could not be long.  That, I fancy, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling clothes.

It is maintained that unswaddled infants would assume faulty positions and make movements which might injure the proper development of their limbs.  That is one of the empty arguments of our false wisdom which has never been confirmed by experience.  Out of all the crowds of children who grow up with the full use of their limbs among nations wiser than ourselves, you never find one who hurts himself or maims himself; their movements are too feeble to be dangerous, and when they assume an injurious position, pain warns them to change it.

We have not yet decided to swaddle our kittens and puppies; are they any the worse for this neglect?  Children are heavier, I admit, but they are also weaker.  They can scarcely move, how could they hurt themselves!  If you lay them on their backs, they will lie there till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over.  Not content with having ceased to suckle their children, women no longer wish to do it; with