It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental reservation in favor of her own, and is very sure that nothing improper or cruel takes place in her nursery. Her children do not complain, and she always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss; on which negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is right, because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare not.
Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery, they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open oppression—a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him. Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.
A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to those neglected childish days of theirs when nurses had it all their own way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the month, and never thoroughly known.
Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind—old retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation—this transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down, and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that of self-preservation.
Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with bewildering men's minds, and emptying their husband's purses for the enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children, and the mother who leaves the health, and mind, and temper, and purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of the color and cut of the frocks and petticoats; and always with the same strain after show, and the same endeavor to make a little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand; and those of a thousand must rival the tenue of little lords and ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent in the tradesman-class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the secret.
Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as they make. More than one child of which we have had personal knowledge has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one. Again, as for the increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living, heated blood, and vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for looking far ahead on any matter, but to expect them to look beyond themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great miracle that never comes.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN.
If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation of their sex would stoop from the sublimer heights of Woman's Rights to arguments of mere human expediency, we fancy they might find some of their critics disposed to listen in a more compliant mood. We can imagine a very good point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by some feminine advocate who would point out in a businesslike way how much more work the world might get through if only woman had fair play. Waste is always a pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever reserved power may lie at present unused in the breasts of half a million of old maids, for instance, is a thought which, with so much to be done around us, it is somewhat uncomfortable to dwell much upon. The argument, too, might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations from a somewhat unexpected quarter.