Puslapio vaizdai
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He knows that it is an expression of your love and tenderness, and that he is the object of it.

"So too it continues after he is advanced from infancy into childhood. When children are beginning to speak they do not and cannot affix any meaning to half the words which they hear; yet they learn their mother tongue. What I say is, do not attempt to force their intellectual growth. Do not feed them with meat till they have teeth to masticate it.

"There is a great deal which they ought to learn, can learn, and must learn, before they can or ought to understand it. How many questions must you have heard from them which you have felt to be best answered, when they were with most dexterity put aside! Let me tell you a story which the Jesuit Manuel de Vergara used to tell of himself. When he was a little boy he asked a Dominican Friar what was the meaning of the seventh commandment, for he said he could not tell what committing adultery was. The Friar not knowing how to answer, cast a perplexed look round the room, and thinking he had found a safe

reply pointed to a kettle on the fire, and said the Commandment meant that he must never put his hand in the pot while it was boiling. The very next day, a loud scream alarmed the family, and behold there was little Manuel running about the room holding up his scalded finger, and exclaiming "Oh dear, oh dear, I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery!"

CHAPTER XVI. P. I.

USE AND ABUSE OF STORIES IN REASONING, WITH A WORD IN BEHALF OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS AND IN

REPROOF OF THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE.

My particular inclination moves me in controversy especially to approve his choice that said, fortia mallem quam formosa. DR. JACKSON.

I ENDED that last chapter with a story, and though "I say it who should not say it," it is a good story well applied. Of what use a story may be even in the most serious debates may be seen from the circulation of old Joes in Parliament, which are as current there as their sterling namesakes used to be in the city some threescore years ago. A jest though it should be as stale as last week's newspaper, and as flat as Lord Flounder's face, is sure to be received

with laughter by the Collective Wisdom of the Nation nay it is sometimes thrown out like a tub to the whale, or like a trail of carrion to draw off hounds from the scent.

The Bill which should have put an end to the inhuman practice of employing children to sweep chimneys, was thrown out on the third reading in the House of Lords (having passed the Commons without a dissentient voice) by a speech from Lord Lauderdale, the force of which consisted in, literally, a Joe Millar jest. He related that an Irishman used to sweep his chimney by letting a rope down, which was fastened round the legs of a goose, and then pulling the goose after it. A neighbour to whom he recommended this as a convenient mode objected to it upon the score of cruelty to the goose upon which he replied, that a couple of ducks might do as well. Now if the Bill before the house had been to enact that men should no longer sweep chimneys but that boys should be used instead, the story would have been applicable. It was no otherwise applicable than as it related to chimney-sweeping:

but it was a joke, and that sufficed. The Lords laughed; his Lordship had the satisfaction of throwing out the Bill, and the home Negro trade has continued from that time, now seven years, till this day, and still continues. His Lordship had his jest, and it is speaking within compass to say that in the course of those seven years two thousand children have been sacrificed in consequence.

The worst actions of Lord Lauderdale's worst ancestor admit of a better defence before God and Man.

Had his Lordship perused the evidence which had been laid before the House of Commons when the Bill was brought in, upon which evidence, the Bill was founded? Was he aware of the shocking barbarities connected with the trade and inseparable from it? Did he know that children inevitably lacerate themselves in learning this dreadful occupation? that they are frequently crippled by it? frequently lose their lives in it by suffocation, or by slow fire? that it induces a peculiar and dreadful disease? that they who survive the accumulated

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