Babies.
T is what a simple young writer once called "a beautiful truism" that baby is one of the oldest subjects in the world—indeed, it is almost as old as man—and yet it has seldom or never been treated with completeness. No doubt one reason for that is the fact that baby has never been able to make itself heard except in inarticulate cries, and no doubt also another reason is that people in general have not been until lately interested in any babies but their own.
The difference between ancient and modern times is remarkable in nothing more than in the treatment of babies. Human life, merely as such, was considered less sacred then than now, and the average view of the baby was simply utilitarian. Was the baby, male or female, a healthy baby? Was it likely to become a sturdy citizen or a stout soldier, or to be the capable mother of strong children? Then let the baby live. Babies that did not satisfy these conditions were disposed of much as we dispose of superfluous puppies or kittens. And not even now, moreover, is baby life considered throughout all the world as something in itself delightful and valuable. Savage people and tribes are not such sinners in this regard as half-civilised nations like those of India and China.
"What is the use of rearing daughters?" asked an intelligent Chinaman not long ago of an inquiring Englishman. "When young they are only an expense, and when grown they marry and go away. Whereas a son."
What a world of difference there is between that sentiment and this of "A Cradle Song," a recent poem by the young poet W. B. Yeats, where the mother addresses her baby thus:—
"I kiss you and kiss you, my arms round my own;
Ah! how I shall miss you, my dear, when you're grown!"
To us, in these later times, and with all the sentiments of Christian civilisation fostered in us, it is almost incomprehensible that any grown human beings could have the heart to extinguish the first struggling life of babies; most of all does it seem incomprehensible that the mother, whose nature is wont to well up and flow out at the first helpless cry of her infant, and the father, whose instinct is to hover over and protect and "fend for" both mother and child in their weakness, could ever surrender, or with their own hands destroy, the creature whom they have brought into the world. But, strong as are the natural instincts, stronger still in many is religious fanaticism, stronger is a national or tribal tradition. And when we consider that it has taken ages of Christian culture and feeling to bring us to our present height of imaginative sympathy with all forms of life, till now we are agreed that no more beautiful, sacred, or divine sight is to be seen under the sun than that of a mother with a child in her arms, then we can understand that, while it is an outrage, a sin, and a crime to destroy a child among the taught of Christendom, it is but a hideous barbarism among the uninstructed of heathendom.
Turning to consider particularly the treatment of babies in various lands, by various peoples and tongues, we are compelled to note that even where infanticide or "exposure" is not practised, a similar result is worked out through the hardships—sometimes unconscious, sometimes designed—of infant life. The conditions of existence among many savage tribes are so severe that only the "fittest," the sturdiest, and wiriest constitutions can survive. There is, for instance, a very fine and intelligent tribe of blacks in the neighbourhood of the Cameroons, named the Duallas, which imposes from the first a very violent test upon the constitutions of their offspring. Like the ancient Germans, the Duallas take a child when only four or five days old and plunge it in the river. This is repeated every day till the child is strong and hardy enough to bathe itself, or till it has succumbed beneath the treatment. Other less intelligent and more savage tribes of Africans train their children to endure torture from a very early age. Even the average nursing of the negro mother is enough to try the toughness of the child's constitution. When the child is being fed he is set astride his mother's hip; and he must hold on how he can and get what nutriment he can, while his mother moves about her ordinary duties. When he is not thus attached to his mother he lies on a little bed of dried
