275. There is no other reason for the people in the American States being generally so much taller and stronger than the people in England are. Their forefathers went, for the greater part, from England. In the four Northern States they went wholly from England, and then, on their landing, they founded a new London, a new Falmouth, a new Plymouth, a new Portsmouth, a new Dover, a new Yarmouth, a new Lynn, a new Boston, and a new Hull, and the country itself they called, and their descendants still call, NEW ENGLAND. This country of the best and boldest seamen, and of the most moral and happy people in the world, is also the country of the tallest and ablest-bodied men in the world. And why? Because, from their very birth, they have an abundance of good food; not only of food, but of rich food. Even when the child is at the breast, a strip of beef-stake, or something of that description, as big and as long as one's finger, is put into its hand. When a baby gets a thing in its hand, the first thing it does is to poke some part of it into its mouth. It cannot bite the meat, but its gums squeeze out the juice. When it has done with the breast, it eats meat constantly twice, if not thrice, a day. And this abundance of good food is the cause, to be sure, of the superior size and strength of the people of that country.
276. Nor is this, in any point of view, an unimportant matter. A tall man is, whether as labourer, carpenter, bricklayer, soldier or sailor, or almost anything else, worth more than a short man: he can look over a higher thing; he can reach higher and wider; he can move on from place to place faster; in mowing grass or corn he takes a wider swarth, in pitching he wants a shorter prong; in making buildings he does not so soon want a ladder or a scaffold; in fighting he keeps his body farther from the point of his sword. To be sure, a man may be tall and weak; but, this is the exception and not the rule: height and weight and strength, in men as in speechless animals, generally go together. Aye, and in enterprise and courage too, the powers of the body have a great deal to do. Doubtless there are, have been, and always will be, great numbers of small and enterprizing and brave men; but it is not in nature, that, generally speaking, those who are conscious of their inferiority in point of bodily strength, should possess the boldness of those who have a contrary description.
277. To what but this difference in the size and strength of the opposing combatants are we to ascribe the ever-to-be-blushed-at events of our last war against the United States! The hearts of our seamen and soldiers were as good as those of the Yankees: on both sides they had sprung from the same stock: on both sides equally well supplied with all the materials of war: if on either side, the superior skill was on ours: French, Dutch, Spaniards, all had confessed our superior prowess: yet, when, with our whole undivided strength, and to that strength adding the flush and pride of victory and conquest, crowned even in the capital of France; when, with all these tremendous advantages, and with all the nations of the earth looking on, we came foot to foot and yard-arm to yard-arm with the Americans, the result was such as an English pen refuses to describe. What, then, was the great cause of this result, which filled us with shame and the world with astonishment? Not the want of courage in our men. There were, indeed, some moral causes at work; but the main cause was, the great superiority of size and of bodily strength on the part of the enemy's soldiers and sailors. It was so many men on each side; but it was men of a different size and strength; and, on the side of the foe, men accustomed to daring enterprise from a consciousness of that strength.
278. Why are abstinence and fasting enjoined by the Catholic Church? Why, to make men humble, meek, and tame; and they have this effect too: this is visible in whole nations as well as in individuals. So that good food, and plenty of it, is not more necessary to the forming of a stout and able body than to the forming of an active and enterprizing spirit. Poor food, short allowance, while they check the growth of the child's body, check also the daring of the mind; and, therefore, the starving or pinching system ought to be avoided by all means. Children should eat often, and as much as they like at a time. They will, if at full heap, never take, of plain food, more than it is good for them to take. They may, indeed, be stuffed with cakes and sweet things till they be ill, and, indeed, until they bring on dangerous disorders: but, of meat plainly and well cooked, and of bread, they will never swallow the tenth part of an ounce more than it is necessary for them to swallow. Ripe fruit, or cooked fruit, if no sweetening take place, will never hurt them; but, when they once get a taste for sugary stuff, and to cram down loads of garden vegetables; when ices, creams, tarts, raisins, almonds, all the endless pamperings come, the doctor must soon follow with his drugs. The blowing out of the bodies of children with tea, coffee, soup, or warm liquids of any kind, is very bad: these have an effect precisely like that which is produced by feeding young rabbits, or pigs, or other young animals upon watery vegetables: it makes them big-bellied and bare-boned at the same time; and it effectually prevents the frame from becoming strong. Children in health want no drink other than skim milk, or butter-milk, or whey; and, if none of those be at hand, water will do very well, provided they have plenty of good meat. Cheese and butter do very well for part of the day. Puddings and pies; but always without sugar, which, say what people will about the wholesomeness of it, is not only of no use in the rearing of children, but injurious: it forces an appetite: like strong drink, it makes daily encroachments on the taste: it wheedles down that which the stomach does not want: it finally produces illness: it is one of the curses of the country; for it, by taking off the bitter of the tea and coffee, is the great cause of sending down into the stomach those quantities of warm water by which the body is debilitated and deformed and the mind enfeebled. I am addressing myself to persons in the middle walk of life; but no parent can be sure that his child will not be compelled to labour hard for its daily bread: and then, how vast is the difference between one who has been pampered with sweets and one who has been reared on plain food and simple drink!
279. The next thing after good and plentiful and plain food is good air. This is not within the reach of every one; but, to obtain it is worth great sacrifices in other respects. We know that there are smells which will cause instant death; we know, that there are others which will cause death in a few years; and, therefore, we know that it is the duty of parents to provide, if possible, against this danger to the health of their offspring. To be sure, when a man is so situated that he cannot give his children sweet air without putting himself into a jail for debt: when, in short, he has the dire choice of sickly children, children with big heads, small limbs, and ricketty joints: or children sent to the poor-house: when this is his hard lot, he must decide for the former sad alternative: but before he will convince me that this is his lot, he must prove to me, that he and his wife expend not a penny in the decoration of their persons; that on his table, morning, noon, or night, nothing ever comes that is not the produce of English soil; that of his time not one hour is wasted in what is called pleasure; that down his throat not one drop or morsel ever goes, unless necessary to sustain life and health. How many scores and how many hundreds of men have I seen; how many thousands could I go and point out, to-morrow, in London, the money expended on whose guzzlings in porter, grog and wine, would keep, and keep well, in the country, a considerable part of the year, a wife surrounded by healthy children, instead of being stewed up in some alley, or back room, with a parcel of poor creatures about her, whom she, though their fond mother, is almost ashamed to call hers! Compared with the life of such a woman, that of the labourer, however poor, is paradise. Tell me not of the necessity of providing money for them, even if you waste not a farthing: you can provide them with no money equal in value to health and straight limbs and good looks: these it is, if within your power, your bounden duty to provide for them: as to providing them with money, you deceive yourself; it is your own avarice, or vanity, that you are seeking to gratify, and not to ensure the good of your children. Their most precious possession is health and strength; and you have no right to run the risk of depriving them of these for the sake of heaping together money to bestow on them: you have the desire to see them rich: it is to gratify yourself that you act in such a case; and you, however you may deceive yourself, are guilty of injustice towards them. You would be ashamed to see them without fortune; but not at all ashamed to see them without straight limbs, without colour in their cheeks, without strength, without activity, and with only half their due portion of reason.
280. Besides sweet air, children want exercise. Even when they are babies in arms, they want tossing and pulling about, and want talking and singing to. They should be put upon their feet by slow degrees, according to the strength of their legs; and this is a matter which a good mother will attend to with incessant care. If they appear to be likely to squint, she will, always when they wake up, and frequently in the day, take care to present some pleasing object right before, and never on the side of their face. If they appear, when they begin to talk, to indicate a propensity to stammer, she will stop them, repeat the word or words slowly herself, and get them to do the same. These precautions are amongst the most sacred of the duties of parents; for, remember, the deformity is for life; a thought which will fill every good parent's heart with solicitude. All swaddling and tight covering are mischievous. They produce distortions of some sort or other. To let children creep and roll about till they get upon their legs of themselves is a very good way. I never saw a native American with crooked limbs or hump-back, and never heard any man say that he had seen one. And the reason is, doubtless, the loose dress in which children, from the moment of their birth, are kept, the good food that they always have, and the sweet air that they breathe in consequence of the absence of all dread of poverty on the part of the parents.
281. As to bodily exercise, they will, when they begin to get about, take, if you let them alone, just as much of it as nature bids them, and no more. That is a pretty deal, indeed, if they be in health; and, it is your duty, now, to provide for their taking of that exercise, when they begin to be what are called boys and girls, in a way that shall tend to give them the greatest degree of pleasure, accompanied with the smallest risk of pain: in other words, to make their lives as pleasant as you possibly can. I have always admired the sentiment of ROUSSEAU upon this subject. 'The boy dies, perhaps, at the age of ten or twelve. Of what use, then, all the restraints, all the privations, all the pain, that you have inflicted upon him? He falls, and leaves your mind to brood over the possibility of your having abridged a life so dear to you.' I do not recollect the very words; but the passage made a deep impression upon my mind, just at the time, too, when I was about to become a father; and I was resolved never to bring upon myself remorse from such a cause; a resolution from which no importunities, coming from what quarter they might, ever induced me, in one single instance, or for one single moment, to depart. I was resolved to forego all the means of making money, all the means of living in any thing like fashion, all the means of obtaining fame or distinction, to give up every thing, to become a common labourer, rather than make my children lead a life of restraint and rebuke; I could not be sure that my children would love me as they loved their own lives; but I was, at any rate, resolved to deserve such love at their hands; and, in possession of that, I felt that I could set calamity, of whatever description, at defiance.
282. Now, proceeding to relate what was, in this respect, my line of conduct, I am not pretending that every man, and particularly every man living in a town, can, in all respects, do as I did in the rearing up of children. But, in many respects, any man may, whatever may be his state of life. For I did not lead an idle life; I had to work constantly for the means of living; my occupation required unremitted attention; I had nothing but my labour to rely on; and I had no friend, to whom, in case of need, I could fly for assistance: I always saw the possibility, and even the probability, of being totally ruined by the hand of power; but, happen what would, I was resolved, that, as long as I could cause them to do it, my children should lead happy lives; and happy lives they did lead, if ever children did in this whole world.
283. The first thing that I did, when the fourth child had come, was to get into the country, and so far as to render a going backward and forward to London, at short intervals, quite out of the question. Thus was health, the greatest of all things, provided for, as far as I was able to make the provision. Next, my being always at home was secured as far as possible; always with them to set an example of early rising, sobriety, and application to something or other. Children, and especially boys, will have some out-of-door pursuits; and it was my duty to lead them to choose such pursuits as combined future utility with present innocence. Each his flower-bed, little garden, plantation of trees; rabbits, dogs, asses, horses, pheasants and hares; hoes, spades, whips, guns; always some object of lively interest, and as much earnestness and bustle about the various objects as if our living had solely depended upon them. I made everything give way to the great object of making their lives happy and innocent. I did not know what they might be in time, or what might be my lot; but I was resolved not to be the cause of their being unhappy then, let what might become of us afterwards. I was, as I am, of opinion, that it is injurious to the mind to press book-learning upon it at an early age: I always felt pain for poor little things, set up, before 'company,' to repeat verses, or bits of plays, at six or eight years old. I have sometimes not known which way to look, when a mother (and, too often, a father), whom I could not but respect on account of her fondness for her child, has forced the feeble-voiced eighth wonder of the world, to stand with its little hand stretched out, spouting the soliloquy of Hamlet, or some such thing. I remember, on one occasion, a little pale-faced creature, only five years old, was brought in, after the feeding part of the dinner was over, first to take his regular half-glass of vintner's brewings, commonly called wine, and then to treat us to a display of his wonderful genius. The subject was a speech of a robust and bold youth, in a Scotch play, the title of which I have forgotten, but the speech began with, 'My name is Norval: on the Grampian Hills my father fed his flocks...' And this in a voice so weak and distressing as to put me in mind of the plaintive squeaking of little pigs when the sow is lying on them. As we were going home (one of my boys and I) he, after a silence of half a mile perhaps, rode up close to the side of my horse, and said, 'Papa, where be the Grampian Hills?' 'Oh,' said I, 'they are in Scotland; poor, barren, beggarly places, covered with heath and rushes, ten times as barren as Sherril Heath.' 'But,' said he, 'how could that little boy's father feed his flocks there, then?' I was ready to tumble off the horse with laughing.
284. I do not know any thing much more distressing to the spectators than exhibitions of this sort. Every one feels, not for the child, for it is insensible to the uneasiness it excites, but for the parents, whose amiable fondness displays itself in this ridiculous manner. Upon these occasions, no one knows what to say, or whither to direct his looks. The parents, and especially the fond mother, looks sharply round for the so-evidently merited applause, as an actor of the name of MUNDEN, whom I recollect thirty years ago, used, when he had treated us to a witty shrug of his shoulders, or twist of his chin, to turn his face up to the gallery for the clap. If I had to declare on my oath which have been the most disagreeable moments of my life, I verily believe, that, after due consideration, I should fix upon those, in which parents, whom I have respected, have made me endure exhibitions like these; for, this is your choice, to be insincere, or to give offence.