ery successive injury and deprivation of force renders the
sufferer more open to every new inroad.

Although the minute hand of our electric watches moves almost
imperceptibly, marking minutes, hours, days, and years, it advances in
measured, limited progression; whereas the effects of suffering on the
child go on advancing in an increasing--nay, multiplying--ratio, by
which, up to a certain point, that of geometrical progression is far
exceeded. If you can realise the fact, which in Montalluyah is
incontestable, that even a scratch, however slight, will injure a child,
it will require little stretch of imagination to form some conception at
least of the injury caused to the beauty, form, health, strength, and
mind of the adult, by the many diseases and sufferings which were
allowed to leave their imprints on the young, impressionable clay and
delicate organisation of the infant. Our children were formerly
afflicted, like yours, with diseases resembling whooping-cough, croup,
measles, small-pox, and other maladies, forming an almost endless list,
and although the child survived the attacks and the incidental suffering
and waste, the evil consequences could never be effectually removed.

The precautions now taken are very numerous. Many by themselves alone
would be productive of great good, but when all are carried out, some
contemporaneously, others successively, a result is scarcely less
certain than the solution of a mathematical problem, based on accurate
premises, save of course in the case of inevitable accidents. My laws
provide for the protection of the child from its birth, nay, as I have
before stated, prior to its birth; for the protection of the parent
precedes that of the child. I knew that if the mother was sickly, or
indulged in injurious habits, the child would suffer. I enjoined
attention to these laws as a portion of the religious duties of the
people. Amongst other things I explained the value of beauty in the
human form, and how, when united with other qualities, it tended to the
happiness of the individual and the well-being of the world. This I did
at length, and in a manner to secure conviction, because it had been the
fashion to decry beauty as a matter of minor importance.

At the risk of repeating myself, I assert that I omitted nothing,
however seemingly insignificant, looking as I did upon my system as upon
one large continuous volume, in which every page had its value. The
absence of a si