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and healthy organizations are debilitated and destroyed. At an age when the organism demands air, and space, and sun, and motion, when the senses are dominated by the inherent necessity for exterior action, we behold children, girls especially, condemned to inaction, excluded from light and air in the paternal mansion, carefully secluded from both through tender regard, if not for the fine furniture, at least for the complexion and the clothing of the poor creatures who are thus made to violate the most obvious dictates of nature. Entire days are passed without beholding a ray of sunlight or breathing the external air. In many private and public schools it would really seem as though everything were expressly devised to weaken the body and to enervate the moral senses. Pupils are constrained to breathe the vitiated atmosphere of the study hall during many hours of each day, subjected the while to an amount of mental application to which even adult natures would succumb. In most of these establishments the provisions for physical development are wretchedly defective.
We make these reflections here because the improvement of the race depends so largely upon the physical improvement of the mothers of the race, and because it is the fashion to deprive girls of physical advantages to even a greater extent than boys. The girls of our country who have the misfortune to be bred in city life, whether in fashionable or semi-fashionable circles, are truly objects of commiseration. In this fast age the very methods most calculated to force a premature womanhood, are those universally adopted, and both at home and at school the poor girl sees and hears so much that is positively poisonous that our only wonder should be, not that our women
