The whole is truly, and nobly, Italian. In any other country a man would fear to be laughed at in showing himself thus truly tender. Not so in Italy. The Doctor wrote to his Italian public, just as he might soliloquise in the privacy of his own study; and he unreservedly pours out all his feelings with an intensity, with a perfectly feminine sensibility, which will make the worldly man laugh, and the kindly man weep. And it must be confessed that his native language has much to do with his power over our feelings; it is the language of women and children, at once so tender and so striking, beautiful even in its terrible accent of grief and suffering. It is a shower of mingled tears and roses.
And then he suddenly stops himself. and apologizes. He would not have written thus, but for sufficient cause, and that cause is that "Those poor children would not have died if they could have been sent to the sea-side." And, the inference? That at the sea-side we must have Hospitals for children. Now here, if you please, is a really skilful, as well as greatly humane, man. He touches the heart; and the rest necessarily follows. Men listen attentively and are touched; women burst into an agony of tears. They beg, they pray, they insist—and who is to resist them? Without waiting for government action, or government aid, a voluntary society has founded a "Children's Sea-Bathing Hospital" at Viareggio.
All who have been there admire the crescent-like sweep, made by the Mediterranean, when it quits Genoa passes the magnificent road of Spezzia and reaches the Virgilian Olive Groves of Tuscany. About half way from Leghorn a cape, stolen from the Sea, is the site, henceforth the sacred site, of this truly admirable foundation.
Florence, by the way, has preceded all Europe in the way of charitable foundations; she had hospitals before the close of the tenth century, and in the year 1287, when Beatrice inspired and maddened Dante, her father, the cruel persecutor of the greater, far greater Dante, founded the hospital of St. Maria Nuova. Even Luther, though in his travels he saw little to admire in Italy, did admire, and very heartily, its Hospitals and the beautiful Italian women, who, veiled, stood by the bedsides of the sick sinner and the dying pauper.
This new foundation, of which we have spoken, will, we trust, be a model for Europe. We owe that much to children; for upon them it is that fall the worst effects of our murderous toils and our still more murderous excesses in every kind of bad life.
It is impossible not to perceive the visible and terrible deterioration of our Western races. The causes of it are numerous and very various. The chief of them all is the immensity and the constant and rapid increase of our hours of labor. For the most part, it is compulsory; compelled by trade regulations and trade necessities. But even where no such compulsion exists, there the same ardor of long hours and hard toil exists. I know not what demoniac fire exists in our modern temperament. Compared to ourselves, all former centuries have been positively idle. Our results, no doubt, are immense. From our prolific brain and iron hand, proceeds such a marvellous flood of art, science, inventions, productions, and ideas, that we are actually glutting the markets, not only of the present, but also of the future. But at what cost are we doing all this? At the price of an awful expenditure of strength, and of nervous energy; we are enervating ourselves, our works are prodigious, and our children are miserable. We condemn them to disease, suffering, and premature death even before they are born. Our spendthrift waste of energy entails feebleness and early death upon them! And let it be remembered that this immense amount of production is the work of only a comparatively small number. America does little of it, Asia next to nothing, and even in Europe all, or nearly all, is done by a few millions in the extreme West. The others laugh to see the really working peoples thus wear themselves out. Poor Barbarians! Do you fancy, then, that this Russian or that Backwoodsman, can replace, at need, a mechanic of London or an optician of Paris? No; we have become such by the education and the practice of long centuries. A whole and a very long tradition is in us. What would become of you if we should die? None of you are ready to succeed us.
But this same murderous toil, this absolutely suicidal production, if we be willing to accept it for ourselves, it is our duty not to accept it for our children; we have no right thus to add murder to suicide. And, yet, that is what we really are doing. They are born already, with our fatigue, our cerebral exhaustion. With a perfectly frightful precocity, they know, they can, they will, and they do. But how long? The grave opens for them so early!
The human infant, like the young plant, needs rest, air, and a sweet liberty. Do we give our children any of these? No; our very virtues, as well as our vices, deny them all. Everything seems to combine to kill them early. Do we love them? No doubt; and yet our worst malice could not do more than we do to kill them early or to cause them to live miserably, pitifully, sufferingly, effeminate. Such a society as ours, so overworked, so over excited, so constantly agitated, is, (whether society will confess it or not) a real, and a murderous war upon our children.
Especially there are times and seasons in the course of the child's growth when his life quite literally hangs upon a thread. Life, at those times, seems to borrow human voice, and to ask,—"Can I possibly last?" At those critical times, see you, the contact of so many, the close, sedentary, and imprisoned life of cities, is just simply Death to those delicate and fading creatures. Or, even worse than Death, it is the commencement of a long career of suffering and helplessness far worse than Death itself. In this latter case you leave a poor creature who, now sick, now well, drags on a wretched existence, a misery to himself and a burthen upon public charity.
All this must be cut short. We must have foresight combined with humanity. We must snatch the child from these murderous surroundings; we must take him from man and give him to the grand nursing of the fecund Nature—of the Sea. And, then, the child will live and become Man. Your very foundlings, if you thus treat them may some day become your Nelsons and your Napiers, and your community, instead of having to support an habitual patient of your hospitals, will have the bold seaman or the strong laborer.