OUR BABIES

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2994, 3 February 1917, Page 5

OUR BABIES

TBT HTGEII.I Published under the auspice .-of the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of • Women «,nd Children. It is wiser to put a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom." AN ANGRY CRITIC. A lady (I assume the iviiter to to a lady), who says she is "a constant and frequently-admiring reader of "Our Babies" column, has published a very furious letter, accusing "Hygoia" of "girding at woman" in a recent article. The articlo referred to contained a warning to mothers regarding; the easily-prc-vontablo risks of infantile diarrhoea, which is liable to be 6uch a terrible scourge in summer time, but which the society has done so much to stamp out— and I certainly made the warning a 6 forcible as I could. The writer says she has "boiled over" with indignation oh account of the following passages taken from my article:— ■ So long as an infant is suckled, and the mother is not only regular, cleanly, and careful in her habits, hut also giveß the baby all his simple primary rights (outing, fresh fir, •sunlight, exercise, etc.), there is no safer season than summer. . . . It is not Nature or Providence that inflicts the curse of summer diarrhoea, but the mother herself. Misleading Quotation. How very easy it is for this 'ady to work herself- up into a fino frenzy by welding into one, passages which occur half a column apart in my article, and by omitting to include in her quotation half a dozen adjacent linos, which would have made quite clear the innocent and entirely beneficent intention of what I wrote. 'However, one gets quite used to this kind of thing, and I may be excused for recalling some trying experiences iu the past in tho same direction. In tho early days of our society, alter speaking glowingly about the love and devotion of the grandmother, .! added, "but, for this very reason, tho grand,mother who happens to be >«norant or prejudiced may prove to be tho baby's worst enemy. I was rather aghast at seeing a special paragraph in the next day's newspaper headed "The. grandmother the Baby's Worst Enemy." In what followed there was no mitigation of the sentence, no mercy for n'.e, but merely a cold-blooded recital of the baleful possibilities of grandmothers. Of- course,'l quite realiso that, when taken out of its context, what I said in the artiole complained of is arrestingly emphatic—but it was intended to arrest attention:— It is not Nature or Provideice that inflicts the curse of summer diarrhoea, but the mother herself. ; Indeed, I am in good company in writing strongly on such a matter. Herbert Spencer, usually the calmest, most logical, and philosophic of writers, is not less emphatic in his passionate pica foa education in parenthood and his denunciation of the evil result of parental ignorance and carelessness:— Quotation from Herbert Spencer. To tens of thousands that are killed, andt hundreds of thousands that survive with feeble constitutions, ( and millions that grow up with constitutions not so strong as they should be, and yon will have some idea of the curse inflicted on their offspring by parents ignorant of the laws of life. As my critic almost consumes herself in cataloguing the wrongs of mothers and tho selfishness of -fathers, she will perhaps resent my quoting from a male author regarding domestic matters. I Temember a scatning retort received long ago on citing a passage from Spencer's immortal essay on Education to a cousin with strong views on the woman question. ' She said witheringly: "What could an old bachelor like Herbert Spencer know about Children and Education?" What.Mrs. Earle Says. , It may seem scarcely worth while to repeat so silly an<( shallow a remark, but it gives me the opportunity to place in :ontrast what a noble wife and mother gratefully acknowledges she owed to Spencer in the rearing of her own family:-' In the days, long ago, when my children were children, and, as is apt to be the case' when one is surrounded with a small, growing-up family, half the population of the world seemed to me to be children, my thoughts were so centred on the subject that nothing else appeared to me to be of any great importance. At that time two books gave me much comfort, support, and instruction. One was "Education,: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical," by Herbert Spencer. This book, now. so much read and so widely known, requires . no recommendation from anyone, but I do wish to say that every father and mother should read it—not once, but again and again. Some will dis- , agree with one part and some with another, but I defy anybody to read it without a certain clearing of the head and opening of the mind, most essential to those who have the heavy responsibility of training the young. If there is one thing above all others that repeats its faults ad nauseam and i 6 blindly conservative, it is the management of children in the nursery and schoolroom. Mr. Herbert Spencer's is a book created by the hand of genius. I humbly bow to it in grateful thanks for all the good I derived from its perusal.—From "J?ot Pourri from a Surrey Garden," by Mrs. Barle. Contrast this frank, warm-hearted, wolanly appreciation with the bitter and irping spirit iu which my oritic tries ) set the sexes at loggerheads by deouueng the father and bewailing the ite of the mother, as if callous indifferqco; were the typical attribute of the lan and unending drudgery the inovitMe lot of the woman. Such distorted ictures don't impose on normal married >lk, but they do tond to make marriage ppear less attractive, and they are not ■uo to life. Of course, marriage is occasionally a tilure, but.what strikes us, and what 10 Plunkot nurses remark from end to id of tho Dominion, is the helpfulness id devotion of the fathers, especially in 10 back-blocks, and their desire to learn rerything they can Rffectiiig tho welire.of mother and child. This is well lustratcd in the large mass of country irrespondence that reaches us and the miand there is for tho Socioty's books id pamphlets, which, the mothers toll i. their husbands consult and master . ist as eagerly as they do themselves. Though [ havo been compelled (o deal enchantly with the perverse protest of y critic, this does not prevent my ap•eciating tho oloverness of her letter, IJ * onto. regr.ot, th,ak euflbVaiKueual iiito

rary ability should not bo expended to better purpose—to t.ho encouragement rather than to the discouragement of the introduction of light and system into the home and nursery.