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page 401
SOMETHING ABOUT BABIES.
A child's first right is to be well born, of parents sound in body and mind, who
can boast a long line of ancestors on both sides; an aristocracy, based on the
cardinal virtues of purity, chastity, sobriety, and honesty.
If the thought, the money, the religious enthusiasm, now expended for the
regeneration of the race, were wisely directed to the generation of our
descendants, to the conditions and environments of parents and children, the
whole face of society might be changed before we celebrate the next Centennial
of our national life.
All religious, educational, benevolent, and industrial societies combined,
working harmoniously together, can not do as much in a life-time of effort,
toward the elevation of mankind, as can parents in the nine months of pre-natal
life. Locke took the ground that the mind of every child born into the world is
like a piece of blank paper, that you may write thereon whatever you will; but
science proves that such idealists as Descartes were nearer right when they
declared that each soul comes freighted with its own ideas, its individual
proclivities; that the pre-natal influences do more in the formation of
character than all the education that comes after.
Let the young man, indulging in all manner of excesses, remember that in
considering the effect of dissipation, wine, and tobacco, on himself and his own
happiness or misery, he does not begin to measure the evil of his life. As the
High Priest at the family altar, his deeds of darkness will entail untold
suffering on generation after generation. Let the young woman with wasp-like
waist, who lives on candies, salads, hot bread, pastry, and pickles, whose
listless brain and idle hands seek no profitable occupation, whose life is given
to folly, remember that to her ignorance and folly may yet be traced the
downfall of a nation.
One of the most difficult lessons to impress on any mind is the power and extent
of individual influence; and parents above all others, resist the belief that
their children are exactly what they make them; no more, no less; like producing
like. If there is a class of educators who need special preparation for their
high and holy calling, it is those who assume the responsibility of parents.
Shall we give less thought to the creation of an immortal being than the artist
devotes to his statue or landscape? We wander through the art galleries in the
old world, and linger before the works of the great masters, transfixed with the
grace and beauty, the glory and granduer, of the ideals that surround us; and,
with equal preparation, greater than these are possible in living, breathing
humanity. The same thought and devotion in real life would soon give us a
generation of saints, scholars, scientists, and
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