When the child cries he is uneasy, he feels some need which he cannot satisfy; you watch him, seek this need, find it, and satisfy it.  If you can neither find it nor satisfy it, the tears continue and become tiresome.  The child is petted to quiet him, he is rocked or sung to sleep; if he is obstinate, the nurse becomes impatient and threatens him; cruel nurses sometimes strike him.  What strange lessons for him at his first entrance into life!

I shall never forget seeing one of these troublesome crying children thus beaten by his nurse.  He was silent at once.  I thought he was frightened, and said to myself, “This will be a servile being from whom nothing can be got but by harshness.”  I was wrong, the poor wretch was choking with rage, he could not breathe, he was black in the face.  A moment later there were bitter cries, every sign of the anger, rage, and despair of this age was in his tones.  I thought he would die.  Had I doubted the innate sense of justice and injustice in man’s heart, this one instance would have convinced me.  I am sure that a drop of boiling liquid falling by chance on that child’s hand would have hurt him less than that blow, slight in itself, but clearly given with the intention of hurting him.

This tendency to anger, vexation, and rage needs great care.  Boerhaave thinks that most of the diseases of children are of the nature of convulsions, because the head being larger in proportion and the nervous system more extensive than in adults, they are more liable to nervous irritation.  Take the greatest care to remove from them any servants who tease, annoy, or vex them.  They are a hundredfold more dangerous and more fatal than fresh air and changing seasons.  When children only experience resistance in things and never in the will of man, they do not become rebellious or passionate, and their health is better.  This is one reason why the children of the poor, who are freer and more independent, are generally less frail and weakly, more vigorous than those who are supposed to be better brought up by being constantly thwarted; but you must always remember that it is one thing to refrain from thwarting them, but quite another to obey them.  The child’s first tears are prayers, beware lest they become commands; he begins by asking for aid, he ends by demanding service.  Thus from his own weakness, the source of his first consciousness of dependence, springs the later idea of rule and tyranny; but as this idea is aroused rather by his needs than by our services, we begin to see moral results whose causes are not in nature; thus we see how important it is, even at the earliest age, to discern the secret meaning of the gesture or cry.