Men, be kind to your fellow-men; this is your first duty, kind to every age and station, kind to all that is not foreign to humanity.  What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?  Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts.  Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?  Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly, of that precious gift which they cannot abuse?  Why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you?  Fathers, can you tell when death will call your children to him?  Do not lay up sorrow for yourselves by robbing them of the short span which nature has allotted to them.  As soon as they are aware of the joy of life, let them rejoice in it, go that whenever God calls them they may not die without having tasted the joy of life.

How people will cry out against me!  I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without a pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.

Now is the time, you say, to correct his evil tendencies; we must increase suffering in childhood, when it is less keenly felt, to lessen it in manhood.  But how do you know that you can carry out all these fine schemes; how do you know that all this fine teaching with which you overwhelm the feeble mind of the child will not do him more harm than good in the future?  How do you know that you can spare him anything by the vexations you heap upon him now?  Why inflict on him more ills than befit his present condition unless you are quite sure that these present ills will save him future ill?  And what proof can you give me that those evil tendencies you profess to cure are not the result of your foolish precautions rather than of nature?  What a poor sort of foresight, to make a child wretched in the present with the more or less doubtful hope of making him happy at some future day.  If such blundering thinkers fail to distinguish between liberty and licence, between a merry child and a spoilt darling, let them learn to discriminate.

Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies.  Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child.  Give each his place, and keep him there.  Control human passions according to man’s nature; that is all we can do for his welfare.  The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

Absolute good and evil are unknown to us.  In this life they are blended together; we never enjoy any perfectly pure feeling, nor do we remain for more than a moment in the same state.  The feelings of our minds, like the changes in our bodies, are in a continual flux.  Good and ill are common to all, but in varying proportions.  The happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least.  Ever more sorrow than joy—­this is the lot of all of us.  Man’s happiness in this world is but a negative state; it must be reckoned by the fewness of his ills.