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CHILDREN'S DISEASE.
"The cause of the Poor to plead on,
'twixt Deity and Demon."
(Carlyle).
"Child of mortality whence contest thou,
Why is thy countenance sad, and why are
Thine eyes red with weeping?"
(Bartauld).
I have opened this chapter with somewhat startling mottos, for its pathetic theme is Children and children's disease; and it seems to me appropriate, in view of what it portends, to send forth in this form a world-thought, as a harbinger of sympathy—a foreword which may set in motion the thought-waves of pity. For of all living creatures born into this world of pompous ignorance and maudlin solicitude to struggle for precarious existence from the cradle to the grave, by reason of the unnatural conditions of our vaunted hygienic and educational systems—generously termed "civilization"—there is surely nothing quite so "poor," so woefully devoid of practical protection, and, in its exceptional helplessness, so weakly gushed over and little understood as the child of frail humanity.
"The cause of the poor"—thus the legend runs—"in deity's or demon's name." For truly, of the two angels which, we are told, attend upon the birth of credulous mankind and the initial stages of development, the malign influence would seem to be ever in the ascendant, irrespective of the social status of the, more or less, pre-natally affected, innocent reproduction wherein is focused the latent follies and delinquencies of the race, as portrayed in the course of its long pangenesis.
Now, incredible though it may seem and deplorable though it be, the secret which has revealed itself with absolute force and conviction to the judicial minds of unemotional scientific observers is simply this: that the children of the present generation are, as an incontestable matter of actual fact, really brought into this world alive and some attain to maturity, not through maternal intelligence, but rather, in spite of mothers. This is a hard saying but none the less a truth. They survive in spite of the idiosyncracies of their fondly irrational, untutored mothers rather than because of any practical, efficient effort these contribute towards the well being and survival of their offspring. This, as a general rule, is unhappily beyond question. It is a rule which has, naturally, many exceptions,—many brave and brilliant ones—these however only serve to confirm it.
Comte, writing as an authority on the subject, made the assertion that there is hardly an example on record of a child of superior genius whose mother did not possess also a superior order of mind. As an example he cites: The mother of Napoleon Bonaparte, high-souled, heroic and beautiful; the mother of Julius Caesar, a singularly fine character, wise and strong; the mother of Goethe,—affectionately termed: "The delight of her children, the favourite of poets and princes—one whose splendid talents and characteristics were reproduced in her son." There are also, we know full well, unnumbered hosts of others, whose kindly light has been shed in many an humble or secluded home, whose beloved names have been called blessed by thousands though unrecorded in historic page—who have lived and loved and passed on to higher realms—to the world, to eulogy and to fame unknown.