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persons crook-kneed, stunted, rickety, deformed in all kinds of ways.
For fear that the bodies of children may be deformed by free movements,
we hasten to deform them by putting them into a press. Of our own
accord we cripple them to prevent their laming themselves.

Must not such a cruel constraint have an influence upon their temper as
well as upon their constitution? Their first feeling is a feeling of
constraint and of suffering. To all their necessary movements they
find only obstacles. More unfortunate than chained criminals, they
make fruitless efforts, they fret themselves, they cry. Do you tell me
that the first sounds they make are cries? I can well believe it; you
thwart them from the time they are born. The first gifts they receive
from you are chains, the first treatment they undergo is torment.
Having nothing free but the voice, why should they not use it in
complaints? They cry on account of the suffering you cause them; if
you were pinioned in the same way, your own cries would be louder.

Whence arises this unreasonable custom of swaddling children? From an
unnatural custom. Since the time when mothers, despising their first
duty, no longer wish to nurse their own children at the breast, it has
been necessary to intrust the little ones to hired women. These,
finding themselves in this way the mothers of strange children,
concerning whom the voice of nature is silent to them, seek only to
spare themselves annoyance. A child at liberty would require incessant
watching; but after he is well swaddled, they throw him into a corner
without troubling themselves at all on account of his cries. Provided
there are no proofs of the nurse's carelessness, provided that the
nursling does not break his legs or his arms, what does it matter,
after all, that he is pining away, or that he continues feeble for the
rest of his life? His limbs are preserved at the expense of his life,
and whatever happens, the nurse is held free from blame.

It is pretended that children, when left free, may put themselves into
bad positions, and make movements liable to injure the proper
conformation of their limbs. This is one of the weak arguments of our
false wisdom, which no experience has ever confirmed. Of that
multitude of children who, among nations more sensible than ourselves,
are brought up in the full freedom of their limbs, not one is seen to
wound or lame himself. They cannot give their movements force en