These precautions are troublesome and costly, but disease is costlier still; and who shall estimate the cost of death!
_ON THE MENTAL AND MORAL FACULTIES IN CHILDHOOD, AND ON THE DISORDERS TO WHICH THEY ARE LIABLE._
Any remarks on the ailments of children would be incomplete if no notice were taken of the mental and moral peculiarities of early life.
For want of giving heed to them, not only are grave mistakes made in the education of children, but in the management of their ailments, both by doctors and by parents: much needless trouble is given to the doctors, much needless distress to the child, much needless anxiety to the parents.
The common mistake committed by those parents who do not make their child an idol to fall down and worship, and thus turn him, to his own misery and theirs, into the most arbitrary of domestic tyrants, is to treat him as though he were in mind, as well as in body, a miniature man; feebler in intellect as he is inferior in strength, but differing in degree only, not in kind.
Now the child differs essentially from the adult in the three respects; that
1. He lives in the present, not in the future.
2. His perceptions are more vivid, and his sensibilities more acute; while the world, on which he has just entered, surrounds him with daily novelties.
3. He has less self-consciousness, less self-dependence, lives as a part of the world by which he is surrounded--a real practical pantheist.
The child lives in the present, not in the future, nor much even in the past, till the world has been some time with him, and he by degrees shares the common heritage of retrospect and anticipation. This is the great secret of the quiet happiness which strikes almost all visitors to a children's hospital.
No one can have watched the sick bed of the child without remarking the almost unvarying patience with which its illness is borne, and the extremity of peril from which apparently, in consequence of that patience, a complete recovery takes place. Much, indeed, is no doubt due to the activity of the reparative powers in early life, but much also to the unruffled quiet of the mind. No sorrow for the past, no gloomy foreboding of the future, no remorse, disappointment, nor anxiety depresses the spirits and enfeebles the vital powers. The prospect of death, even when its approach is realised--and this is not so rare as some may imagine--brings in general but small alarm. This may be from the vagueness of the child's ideas; it may be, as the poet says, that in his short life's journey, 'the heaven that lies about us in our infancy' has been so much with him, that he recognises more clearly than we can do