On many accounts. They induce young ladies to sit up late at night; they cause them to dress more lightly than they are accustomed to do; and thus thinly clad, they leave their homes while the weather is perhaps piercing cold, to plunge into a suffocating, hot ball-room, made doubly injurious by the immense number of lights, which consume the oxygen intended for the due performance of the healthy function of the lungs. Their partners, the brilliancy of the scene, and the music excite their nerves to undue, and thus to unnatural action, and what is the consequence? Fatigue, weakness, hysterics, and extreme depression follow. They leave the heated ball-room, when the morning has far advanced, to breathe the bitterly cold and frequently damp air of a winter’s night, and what is the result? Hundreds die of consumption who might otherwise have lived. Ought there not, then, to be a distinction between a ball at midnight and a dance in the evening?
340. But still, would you have a girl brought up to forego the pleasures of a ball?
If a parent prefer her so-called pleasures to her health, certainly not; to such a mother I do not address myself.
341. Have you any remarks to make on singing, or on reading aloud?
Before a mother allows her daughter to take lessons in singing, she should ascertain that there be no actual disease of the lungs, for if there be, it will probably excite it into action; but if no disease exist, singing or reading aloud is very conducive to health. Public singers are seldom known to die of consumption. Singing expands the chest, improves the pronunciation, enriches the voice for conversation, strengthens the lungs, and wards off many of their diseases.
EDUCATION.
342. Do you approve of corporal punishment in schools?
I do not. I consider it to be decidedly injurious both to body and mind. Is it not painful to witness the pale cheeks and the dejected looks of those boys who are often flogged? If their tempers are mild, their spirits are broken; if their dispositions are at all obstinate, they become hardened and willful, and are made little better than brutes. A boy who is often flogged loses that noble ingenuousness and fine sensibility so characteristic of youth. He looks upon his school as his prison, and his master as his jailer, and, as he grows up to manhood, hates and despises the man who has flogged him. Corporal punishment is revolting, disgusting, and demoralizing to the boy, and is degrading to the school-master as a man and as a Christian.
“I would have given him, Captain Fleming, had he been my son,” quoth old Pearson the elder, “such a good sound drubbing as he never would have forgotten—never!”
“Pooh! pooh! my good sir. Don’t tell me. Never saw flogging in the navy do good. Kept down brutes; never made a man yet.”—Dr. Norman Macleod in Good Words.