CHAPTER VI.
INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL HAPPINESS.
To a healthy child who has been well trained, nothing appears more easy than to be happy; to a child who has been badly trained, whose infant years have been neglected or motherless, nothing appears more difficult. There is often something in the bodily constitution, too, which stands in the way of individual happiness, without our being sensible of any actual disease; and the mother ought to watch carefully every symptom of this nature as indications of growing evil, which may frustrate much of the good she naturally looks forward to in the future experience of her child. She ought especially to observe, if, when the family group are loudest in their mirth, there is one who falls back from the cheerful circle, and who, instead of catching the natural infection of laughter and glee, sits moping alone, with cloudy brow, and drooping head, as if incapable of partaking in the general feeling. Such a tendency as this, is generally to be attributed to some bodily indisposition, of which perhaps the child is not aware; but it may also arise from a peculiarity of temperament, only to be accounted for upon the principle that there are diseases of mind, as well as body, the seeds of which are inherent in our nature.
If, in order to correct a melancholy tendency discoverable in infancy, the child is harshly treated, punished, scolded, and compelled to play, it is needless to foretell the utter ruin of its temper, and probably of its moral character altogether; for never yet was melancholy expelled except by the substitution of cheerfulness; and never yet was a child made cheerful by harshness and compulsion.
While thinking how much a kind and judicious mother can do toward correcting the melancholy temperament of her child, the heart aches for those who have no mother, who, in their moments of sadness and sorrow, are subjected to the ridicule of their companions, and who consequently
