PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 



l S7 



results, and latterly to still stranger disputes concerning the propriety 

 of acknowledging the failure, and the best way of compromising the 

 consequences ; but such controversies could often be simplified by 

 tracing the effects to their causes. Ill-founded buildings are naturally 

 shaky. Still, people dislike to be lectured on the chronic dilapidation 

 of their parlor-walls. But he who succeeds in exposing the rotten- 

 ness of the foundation-timbers will need no specious arguments to 

 demonstrate the expediency of removing the household goods to a safer 

 place. 



For many centuries the training of the young was almost monop- 

 olized by the propagandists of that most terrible of all delusions, the 

 natural-depravity dogma, and our whole system of practical educa- 

 tion is -still interwoven with the following fallacies, all more or less 

 deeply-rooted upshots of that dogma : 



1. The Leading-Strings Fallacy. From the moment a child 

 is born, he is treated on the principle that all his instincts are essen- 

 tially wrong, that Nature must be thwarted and counteracted in every 

 possible way. He is strapped up in a contrivance that he would be 

 glad to exchange for a strait- jacket, kept for hours in a position 

 that prevents him from moving any limb of his body. His first at- 

 tempts at locomotion are checked ; he is put in leading-strings, he is 

 carefully guarded from the out-door world, from the air that would 

 invigorate his lungs, from the sports that would develop his muscles. 

 Hence, the peevishness, awkwardness, and sickliness of our young 

 aristocrats. Poor people have no time to imitate the absurdities of 

 their wealthy neighbors, and their children profit by what the model 

 nurse would undoubtedly call neglect. Indian babies are still better 

 off. They are fed on bull-beef, and kicked around like young dogs ; 

 but they are not swaddled, they are not cradled, and not dosed with 

 paregoric ; they crawl around naked, and soon learn to keep out of 

 the way ; they are happy, they never cry. If we would treat our 

 youngsters in the same way, only substituting kisses and bread for 

 kicks and beef, they would be as happy as kids in a clover-field, and 

 moreover they would afterward be hardier and stronger. Every week 

 the newspapers tell us about ladies tumbling down-stairs and breaking 

 both arms ; boys falling from a fence and fracturing their collar-bones. 

 From what height would a young Comanche have to fall to break 

 such bones not to mention South-Sea Island children and young 

 monkeys ? The bones of an infant are plastic : letting it tumble and 

 roll about would harden the bony tissue ; guarding it like a piece of 

 brittle crockery makes its limbs as fragile as glass. Christian mothers 

 reproach themselves with neglecting their duty to their children if 

 they do not constantly interfere with their movements, but they for- 

 get that in points of physical education Nature herself is such an excel- 

 lent teacher that the apparent neglect is really a transfer of the pupil 

 to a more efficient school. 



