more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the
modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts
can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride.
Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in
these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the
strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that of
self-preservation.

Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire
in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with
bewildering men's minds, and emptying their husband's purses for the
enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children,
and the mother who leaves the health, and mind, and temper, and purity
of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of
the color and cut of the frocks and petticoats; and always with the same
strain after show, and the same endeavor to make a little look a mickle.
The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand;
and those of a thousand must rival the _tenue_ of little lords and
ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent in the
tradesman-class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the
secret.

Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with
simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are
now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as
they make. More than one child of which we have had personal knowledge
has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a
diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food,
and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one. Again, as for the
increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if
desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by
an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living,
heated blood, and vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming
physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should
forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to
their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for
looking far ahead on any matter, but to expect them to look beyond
themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great
miracle that