desire here to brand it
as at once a platitude and a falsehood. How the idea gained currency,
that childhood is the happiest period of life, I cannot conceive. How,
once started, it kept afloat, is equally incomprehensible. I should
have supposed that the experience of every sane person would have given
the lie to it. I should have supposed that every soul, as it burst into
flower, would have hurled off the imputation. I can only account for
it by recurring to Lady Mary Wortley Montague's statistics, and
concluding that the fools ARE three out of four in every person's
acquaintance.

I for one lift up my voice emphatically against the assertion, and do
affirm that I think childhood is the most undesirable portion of human
life, and I am thankful to be well out of it. I look upon it as no
better than a mitigated form of slavery. There is not a child in the
land that can call his soul, or his body, or his jacket his own. A
little soft lump of clay he comes into the world, and is moulded into a
vessel of honor or a vessel of dishonor long before he can put in a
word about the matter. He has no voice as to his education or his
training, what he shall eat, what he shall drink, or wherewithal he
shall be clothed. He has to wait upon the wisdom, the whims, and often
the wickedness of other people. Imagine, my six-foot friend, how you
would feel, to be obliged to wear your woollen mittens when you desire
to bloom out in straw-colored kids, or to be buttoned into your black
waistcoat when your taste leads you to select your white, or to be
forced under your Kossuth hat when you had set your heart on your black
beaver: yet this is what children are perpetually called on to
undergo. Their wills are just as strong as ours, and their tastes are
stronger, yet they have to bend the one and sacrifice the other; and
they do it under pressure of necessity. Their reason is not convinced;
they are forced to yield to superior power; and, of all disagreeable
things in the world, the most disagreeable is not to have your own way.
When you are grown up, you wear a print frock because you cannot afford
a silk, or because a silk would be out of place,--you wear India-rubber
overshoes because your polished patent-leather would be ruined by the
mud; and your self-denial is amply compensated by the reflection of
superior fitness or economy. But a child has no such reflection to
console him. He puts on his battered, gray old shoes becau