SPOILT CHILDREN. [CHAP. XXXII. 



no more questions on the subject. He then said, &quot; It was bitten 

 off.&quot; To have thus precluded them for the rest of a long jour 

 ney from asking how it was bitten off, was a truly ingenious 

 method of putting impertinent curiosity on the rack. 



ftVhen my wife first entered the ladies cabin, she found every 

 one of the numerous rocking-chairs filled with a mother suckling 

 an infant. As none of them had nurses or servants, all their other 

 children were at large, and might have been a great resource to 

 passengers suflering from ennui, had they been under tolerable 

 control. As it was, they were so riotous and undisciplined, as to 

 be the torment of all who approached them. &quot; How fortunate 

 you are,&quot; said one of the mothers to my w r ife, &quot; to be without 

 children ; they are so ungovernable, and, if you switch them, they 

 sulk, or go into hysterics.&quot; The threat of &quot; I ll switch you,&quot; is 

 forever vociferated in an angry tone, but never carried into execu 

 tion. One genteel and pleasing young lady sat down by my wife, 

 and began conversation by saying, ; You hate children, don t you ?&quot; 

 intimating that such were her own feelings. A medical man, in. 

 large practice, in one of the southern states, told us he often lost 

 young patients in fevers, and other cases where excitement of the 

 nerves was dangerous, by the habitual inability of the parents to 

 exert the least command over their children. We saw an instance 

 where a young girl, in considerable danger, threw the medicine into 

 the physician s face, and heaped most abusive epithets upon him. 

 The Director of the State Penitentiary, in Georgia, told me, 

 that he had been at some pains to trace out the history of the 

 most desperate characters under his charge, and found that they 

 had been invariably spoilt children ; and, he added, if young 

 Americans were not called upon to act for themselves at so early 

 an age, and undergo the rubs and discipline of the world, they 

 would be more vicious arid immoral than the people of any other 

 nation. Yet there is no country where children ought to be so 

 great a blessing, or where they can be so easily provided for. 

 Parents have not the excuse of Mrs. MacClarty, in the &quot; Cottag 

 ers of Glenburnie,&quot; when she exclaims, &quot; If I don t give the boy 

 his own way, what else have I to give him ?&quot; but it is probably 

 because so many of these western settlers have risen recently from 



