should not be so
high as to render them uncomfortable. Nor should the backs of seats be
so high as they usually are, either for children or adults. They should
never come much higher than the middle of the body. If they reach the
shoulders, they either favor a crouching forward, or interfere with the
free action of the lungs.

This might be deemed a proper place for saying something on the position
of children in manufactories. But here a world of abuse opens upon my
view, the full development of which demands a large volume. How many
crooked spines, emaciated bodies, decaying lungs, as well as scrofulas,
fevers, and consumptions, are either induced or accelerated by these
unnatural employments! I mean they are unnatural for the _young_. As to
employing adults in them, I have nothing at present to say. But when I
think of the cruel custom of placing children in these places, whose
bodies--and were this the place, I might add, _minds_--are immature, and
especially girls, I am compelled, by the voice of conscience, and, as I
trust, by a regard to those laws which God has established in our
physical frames, but which are yet so strangely violated, to protest
against it. Better that no factories should exist, than that children
should be ruined in them as they now are. Better by far that we should
return, were it possible, to the primitive habits of New England--to
those by-gone days when mothers and daughters made the wearing apparel
of themselves and their families--when, if there was less of
intellectual cultivation, and less money expended for luxuries and
extravagances, there was much more of health and happiness.

There is one more species of abuse to which, in closing, I wish to
direct maternal attention. I allude to injudicious modes of inflicting
corporal punishment.

Let me not be understood to appear, in this place, as the advocate of
bodily punishments of any kind; for if they are even admissible under
some circumstances, I am fully convinced that in the way in which they
are commonly administered, they do much more harm than good.

But leaving the question of their utility, in the abstract, wholly
untouched, and taking it for granted, for the present, that they are--as
is undoubtedly the fact--sometimes employed, and will continue to be so
for a great while to come, I proceed to speak of their more flagrant
abuses.

Among these, none are more reprehensible than blows of any kind on the
head. Even the rod