Advice to Young Men / And (Incidentally) to Young Women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life. In a Series of Letters, Addressed to a Youth, a Bachelor, a Lover, a Husband, a Father, a Citizen, or a Subject.

by William Cobbett

255. I have before urged upon young married men, in the middle walks of life, to keep the servants out of the house as long as possible; and when they must come at last, when they must be had even to assist in taking care of children, let them be assistants in the most strict sense of the word; let them not be confided in; let children never be left to them alone; and the younger the child, the more necessary a rigid adherence to this rule. I shall be told, perhaps, by some careless father, or some play-haunting mother, that female servants are women, and have the tender feelings of women. Very true; and, in general, as good and kind in their nature as the mother herself. But they are not the mothers of your children, and it is not in nature that they should have the care and anxiety adequate to the necessity of the case. Out of the immediate care and personal superintendence of one or the other of the parents, or of some trusty relation, no young child ought to be suffered to be, if there be, at whatever sacrifice of ease or of property, any possibility of preventing it: because, to insure, if possible, the perfect form, the straight limbs, the sound body, and the sane mind of your children, is the very first of all your duties. To provide fortunes for them; to make provision for their future fame; to give them the learning necessary to the calling for which you destine them: all these may be duties, and the last is a duty; but a duty far greater than, and prior to, all these, is the duty of neglecting nothing within your power to insure them a sane mind in a sound and undeformed body. And, good God! how many are the instances of deformed bodies, of crooked limbs, of idiocy, or of deplorable imbecility, proceeding solely from young children being left to the care of servants! One would imagine, that one single sight of this kind to be seen, or heard of, in a whole nation, would be sufficient to deter parents from the practice. And what, then, must those parents feel, who have brought this life-long sorrowing on themselves! When once the thing is done, to repent is unavailing. And what is now the worth of all the ease and all the pleasures, to enjoy which the poor sufferer was abandoned to the care of servants!

256. What! can I plead example, then, in support of this rigid precept? Did we, who have bred up a family of children, and have had servants during the greater part of the time, never leave a young child to the care of servants? Never; no, not for one single hour. Were we, then, tied constantly to the house with them? No; for we sometimes took them out; but one or the other of us was always with them, until, in succession, they were able to take good care of themselves; or until the elder ones were able to take care of the younger, and then they sometimes stood sentinel in our stead. How could we visit then? Why, if both went, we bargained beforehand to take the children with us; and if this were a thing not to be proposed, one of us went, and the other stayed at home, the latter being very frequently my lot. From this we never once deviated. We cast aside all consideration of convenience; all calculations of expense; all thoughts of pleasure of every sort. And, what could have equalled the reward that we have received for our care and for our unshaken resolution in this respect?

257. In the rearing of children, there is resolution wanting as well as tenderness. That parent is not truly affectionate who wants the courage to do that which is sure to give the child temporary pain. A great deal, in providing for the health and strength of children, depends upon their being duly and daily washed, when well, in cold water from head to foot. Their cries testify to what a degree they dislike this. They squall and kick and twist about at a fine rate; and many mothers, too many, neglect this, partly from reluctance to encounter the squalling, and partly, and much too often, from what I will not call idleness, but to which I cannot apply a milder term than neglect. Well and duly performed, it is an hour's good tight work; for, besides the bodily labour, which is not very slight when the child gets to be five or six months old, there is the singing to overpower the voice of the child. The moment the stripping of the child used to begin, the singing used to begin, and the latter never ceased till the former had ceased. After having heard this go on with all my children, ROUSSEAU taught me the philosophy of it. I happened, by accident, to look into his EMILE, and there I found him saying, that the nurse subdued the voice of the child and made it quiet, by drowning its voice in hers, and thereby making it perceive that it could not be heard, and that to continue to cry was of no avail. 'Here, Nancy,' said I (going to her with the book in my hand), 'you have been a great philosopher all your life, without either of us knowing it.' A silent nurse is a poor soul. It is a great disadvantage to the child, if the mother be of a very silent, placid, quiet turn. The singing, the talking to, the tossing and rolling about, that mothers in general practise, are very beneficial to the children: they give them exercise, awaken their attention, animate them, and rouse them to action. It is very bad to have a child even carried about by a dull, inanimate, silent servant, who will never talk, sing or chirrup to it; who will but just carry it about, always kept in the same attitude, and seeing and hearing nothing to give it life and spirit. It requires nothing but a dull creature like this, and the washing and dressing left to her, to give a child the rickets, and make it, instead of being a strong straight person, tup-shinned, bow-kneed, or hump-backed; besides other ailments not visible to the eye. By-and-by, when the deformity begins to appear, the doctor is called in, but it is too late: the mischief is done; and a few months of neglect are punished by a life of mortification and sorrow, not wholly unaccompanied with shame.

258. It is, therefore, a very spurious kind of tenderness that prevents a mother from doing the things which, though disagreeable to the child, are so necessary to its lasting well-being. The washing daily in the morning is a great thing; cold water winter or summer, and this never left to a servant, who has not, in such a case, either the patience or the courage that is necessary for the task. When the washing is over, and the child dressed in its day-clothes, how gay and cheerful it looks! The exercise gives it appetite, and then disposes it to rest; and it sucks and sleeps and grows, the delight of all eyes, and particularly those of the parents. 'I can't bear that squalling!' I have heard men say; and to which I answer, that 'I can't bear such men!' There are, I thank God, very few of them; for, if they do not always reason about the matter, honest nature teaches them to be considerate and indulgent towards little creatures so innocent and so helpless and so unconscious of what they do. And the noise: after all, why should it disturb a man? He knows the exact cause of it: he knows that it is the unavoidable consequence of a great good to his child, and of course to him: it lasts but an hour, and the recompense instantly comes in the looks of the rosy child, and in the new hopes which every look excites. It never disturbed me, and my occupation was one of those most liable to disturbance by noise. Many a score papers have I written amidst the noise of children, and in my whole life never bade them be still. When they grew up to be big enough to gallop about the house, I have, in wet weather, when they could not go out, written the whole day amidst noise that would have made some authors half mad. It never annoyed me at all. But a Scotch piper, whom an old lady, who lived beside us at Brompton, used to pay to come and play a long tune every day, I was obliged to bribe into a breach of contract. That which you are pleased with, however noisy, does not disturb you. That which is indifferent to you has not more effect. The rattle of coaches, the clapper of a mill, the fall of water, leave your mind undisturbed. But the sound of the pipe, awakening the idea of the lazy life of the piper, better paid than the labouring man, drew the mind aside from its pursuit; and, as it really was a nuisance, occasioned by the money of my neighbour, I thought myself justified in abating it by the same sort of means.

259. The cradle is in poor families necessary; because necessity compels the mother to get as much time as she can for her work, and a child can rock the cradle. At first we had a cradle; and I rocked the cradle, in great part, during the time that I was writing my first work, that famous MAÎTRE D'ANGLAIS, which has long been the first book in Europe, as well as in America, for teaching of French people the English language. But we left off the use of the cradle as soon as possible. It causes sleep more, and oftener, than necessary: it saves trouble; but to take trouble was our duty. After the second child, we had no cradle, however difficult at first to do without it. When I was not at my business, it was generally my affair to put the child to sleep: sometimes by sitting with it in my arms, and sometimes by lying down on a bed with it, till it fell asleep. We soon found the good of this method. The children did not sleep so much, but they slept more soundly. The cradle produces a sort of dosing, or dreaming sleep. This is a matter of great importance, as every thing must be that has any influence on the health of children. The poor must use the cradle, at least until they have other children big enough to hold the baby, and to put it to sleep; and it is truly wonderful at how early an age they, either girls or boys, will do this business faithfully and well. You see them in the lanes, and on the skirts of woods and commons, lugging a baby about, when it sometimes weighs half as much as the nurse. The poor mother is frequently compelled, in order to help to get bread for her children, to go to a distance from home, and leave the group, baby and all, to take care of the house and of themselves, the eldest of four or five, not, perhaps, above six or seven years old; and it is quite surprising, that, considering the millions of instances in which this is done in England, in the course of a year, so very, very few accidents or injuries arise from the practice; and not a hundredth part so many as arise in the comparatively few instances in which children are left to the care of servants. In summer time you see these little groups rolling about up the green, or amongst the heath, not far from the cottage, and at a mile, perhaps, from any other dwelling, the dog their only protector. And what fine and straight and healthy and fearless and acute persons they become! It used to be remarked in Philadelphia, when I lived there, that there was not a single man of any eminence, whether doctor, lawyer, merchant, trader, or any thing else, that had not been born and bred in the country, and of parents in a low state of life. Examine London, and you will find it much about the same. From this very childhood they are from necessity entrusted with the care of something valuable. They practically learn to think, and to calculate as to consequences. They are thus taught to remember things; and it is quite surprising what memories they have, and how scrupulously a little carter-boy will deliver half-a-dozen messages, each of a different purport from the rest, to as many persons, all the messages committed to him at one and the same time, and he not knowing one letter of the alphabet from another. When I want to remember something, and am out in the field, and cannot write it down, I say to one of the men, or boys, come to me at such a time, and tell me so and so. He is sure to do it; and I therefore look upon the memorandum as written down. One of these children, boy or girl, is much more worthy of being entrusted with the care of a baby, any body's baby, than a servant-maid with curled locks and with eyes rolling about for admirers. The locks and the rolling eyes, very nice, and, for aught I know, very proper things in themselves; but incompatible with the care of your baby, Ma'am; her mind being absorbed in contemplating the interesting circumstances which are to precede her having a sweet baby of her own; and a sweeter than yours, if you please, Ma'am; or, at least, such will be her anticipations. And this is all right enough; it is natural that she should think and feel thus; and knowing this, you are admonished that it is your bounden duty not to delegate this sacred trust to any body.

260. The courage, of which I have spoken, so necessary in the case of washing the children in spite of their screaming remonstrances, is, if possible, more necessary in cases of illness, requiring the application of medicine, or of surgical means of cure. Here the heart is put to the test indeed! Here is anguish to be endured by a mother, who has to force down the nauseous physic, or to apply the tormenting plaster! Yet it is the mother, or the father, and more properly the former, who is to perform this duty of exquisite pain. To no nurse, to no hireling, to no alien hand, ought, if possible to avoid it, this task to be committed. I do not admire those mothers who are too tender-hearted to inflict this pain on their children, and who, therefore, leave it to be inflicted by others. Give me the mother who, while the tears stream down her face, has the resolution scrupulously to execute, with her own hands, the doctor's commands. Will a servant, will any hireling, do this? Committed to such hands, the least trouble will be preferred to the greater: the thing will, in general, not be half done; and if done, the suffering from such hands is far greater in the mind of the child than if it came from the hands of the mother. In this case, above all others, there ought to be no delegation of the parental office. Here life or limb is at stake; and the parent, man or woman, who, in any one point, can neglect his or her duty here, is unworthy of the name of parent. And here, as in all the other instances, where goodness in the parents towards the children gives such weight to their advice when the children grow up, what a motive to filial gratitude! The children who are old enough to deserve and remember, will witness this proof of love and self-devotion in their mother. Each of them feels that she has done the same towards them all; and they love her and admire and revere her accordingly.

261. This is the place to state my opinions, and the result of my experience, with regard to that fearful disease the SMALL-POX; a subject, too, to which I have paid great attention. I was always, from the very first mention of the thing, opposed to the Cow-Pox scheme. If efficacious in preventing the Small-Pox, I objected to it merely on the score of its beastliness. There are some things, surely, more hideous than death, and more resolutely to be avoided; at any rate, more to be avoided than the mere risk of suffering death. And, amongst other things, I always reckoned that of a parent causing the blood, and the diseased blood too, of a beast to be put into the veins of human beings, and those beings the children of that parent. I, therefore, as will be seen in the pages of the Register of that day, most strenuously opposed the giving of twenty thousand pounds to JENNER out of the taxes, paid in great part by the working people, which I deemed and asserted to be a scandalous waste of the public money.

262. I contended, that this beastly application could not, in nature, be efficacious in preventing the Small-Pox; and that, even if efficacious for that purpose, it was wholly unnecessary. The truth of the former of these assertions has now been proved in thousands upon thousands of instances. For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was boldly and brazenly asserted. This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds. Speedily sprang up the 'ROYAL Jennerian Institution,' and Branch Institutions, issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising and enlightened generation with the beastly matter. 'Gentlemen and Ladies' made the commodity a pocket-companion; and if a cottager's child (in Hampshire at least), even seen by them, on a common, were not pretty quick in taking to its heels, it had to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow. One would have thought, that one-half of the cows in England must have been tapped to get at such a quantity of the stuff.

263. In the midst of all this mad work, to which the doctors, after having found it in vain to resist, had yielded, the real small-pox, in its worst form, broke out in the town of RINGWOOD, in HAMPSHIRE, and carried off, I believe (I have not the account at hand), more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the cow-pox 'so nicely!' And what was now said? Was the quackery exploded, and were the granters of the twenty thousand pounds ashamed of what they had done? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskilful operators; to the staleness of the matter; to its not being of the genuine quality. Admitting all this, the scheme stood condemned; for the great advantages held forth were, that any body might perform the operation, and that the matter was every where abundant and cost-free. But these were paltry excuses; the mere shuffles of quackery; for what do we know now? Why, that in hundreds of instances, persons cow-poxed by JENNER HIMSELF, have taken the real small-pox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder, or narrowly escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances, the parties concerned being living and well-known, one of them to the whole nation, and the other to a very numerous circle in the higher walks of life. The first is Sir RICHARD PHILLIPS, so well known by his able writings, and equally well known by his exemplary conduct as Sheriff of London, and by his life-long labours in the cause of real charity and humanity. Sir Richard had, I think, two sons, whose veins were impregnated by the grantee himself. At any rate he had one, who had, several years after Jenner had given him the insuring matter, a very hard struggle for his life, under the hands of the good, old-fashioned, seam-giving, and dimple-dipping small-pox. The second is PHILIP CODD, Esq., formerly of Kensington, and now of Rumsted Court, near Maidstone, in Kent, who has a son that had a very narrow escape under the real small-pox, about four years ago, and who also had been cow-poxed by Jenner himself. This last-mentioned gentleman I have known, and most sincerely respected, from the time of our both being about eighteen years of age. When the young gentleman, of whom I am now speaking, was very young, I having him upon my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent mother, whether he had been inoculated. 'Oh, no!' said she, 'we are going to have him vaccinated.' Whereupon I, going into the garden to the father, said, 'I do hope, Codd, that you are not going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.' 'Why,' said he, 'you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by Jenner himself.' What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine.

264. Now, here are instances enough; but, every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught the small-pox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other 'vaccinated' youths who did the same, at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that the cow-pox has been proved to be no guarantee against the small-pox, it makes it' milder' when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp, or on the seas), it will be 'milder!' It was not too mild to kill at RINGWOOD; and its mildness, in case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it from blinding him for a suitable number of days. I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of the father and mother upon this occasion; both of them the best of parents, and both of them now punished for having yielded to this fashionable quackery. I will not say, justly punished; for affection for their children, in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents should be under the influence of reason and experience, as well as under that of affection; and now, at any rate, they ought to set this really dangerous quackery at nought.