oving, fun-loving, playful, yet earnest life, from day to day,
a pure and perfect example, to my eye, of what God meant children to be.
I cannot see how he should be very different from what he is, even if he
were in heaven, or if Adam had never sinned. There is so fearful an
amount of, and so decided a bent towards, wickedness in the world, that
it seems as if nothing less than an inborn aptitude for wickedness can
account for it; yet, in spite of all theories and probabilities, here is
Jamie, right under my own eye, developing a far stronger tendency to
love, kindness, sympathy, and all the innocent and benevolent qualities,
than to their opposites. The wrong that he does do seems to be more from
fun and frolic, from sheer exuberance of animal spirits and intensity of
devotion to mirth, than anything else. He seems to be utterly devoid of
malice, cruelty, revenge, or any evil motive. Even selfishness, which I
take to be the fruitful mother of evil, is held in abeyance, is
subordinate to other and nobler qualities. Candy is dearer to him than
he knows how to express; yet he scrupulously lays a piece on the mantel
for an absent friend; and though he has it in full view, and climbs up
to it, and in the extremity of his longing has been known, I think, to
chip off the least little bit with his sharp mouse-teeth, yet he endures
to the end and delivers up the candy with an eagerness hardly surpassed
by that with which he originally received it. Can self-denial go
farther?

It seems to me that the reason of Jamie's gentleness and cheerfulness
and goodness is, that he is comfortable and happy. The animal is in fine
condition, and the spirit is therefore well served; consequently, both
go on together with little friction. And I cannot but suspect that a
great deal of human depravity comes from human misery. The destruction
of the poor is his poverty. Little sickly, fretful, crying babies, heirs
of worn nerves, fierce tempers, sad hearts, sordid tastes, half-tended
or over-tended, fed on poison by the hand of love, nay, sucking poison
from the breasts of love, trained to insubordination, abused by
kindness, abused by cruelty,--that is the human nature from which
largely we generalize, and no wonder the inference is total depravity.
But human nature, distorted, defiled, degraded by centuries of
misdealing, is scarcely human _nature_. Let us discover it before we
define it. Let us remove accretions of long-standing moral and physi