In obtaining healthy dress for the child we are also bringing a good influence to bear on its life conditions. The period of growth is that which, other things equal, determines for happiness or misery the future of the individual. It is the period of greatest bodily and mental activity, when body and mind, as it were, are being built up, and it is the parent's duty to see that they are being built upon firm foundations.
Herbert Spencer says: "The training of children—physical, moral, and intellectual—is dreadfully defective, and in great measure it is so because parents are devoid of that knowledge by which this training can alone be rightly guided. What is to be expected when one of the most intricate problems is undertaken by those who have given scarcely a thought to the principles on which its solution depends?" Here Spencer touches the mainspring of the question. That the sins of the parents are visited upon the children is too true in every sense. Parents are not sufficiently impressed with the idea of their moral responsibility in regard to their children. They do not realize the important truth that every action of theirs which relates to their child, every item of that child's daily life, will influence its whole future, physical and mental; for the two are inseparably interwoven. Nor do they conceive that wider truth, that not only the future of the young individual, but that of generations to come is affected by the treatment each child receives during its earliest years.
Even sensible parents often leave their young
