fit; but, they were not told the cause.  The girl, however, who was a neighbour’s daughter, being on her death-bed about ten years afterwards, could not die in peace without sending for the mother of the child (now become a young man) and asking forgiveness of her.  The mother herself was, however, the greatest offender of the two:  a whole lifetime of sorrow and of mortification was a punishment too light for her and her husband.  Thousands upon thousands of human beings have been deprived of their senses by these and similar means.

269.  It is not long since that we read, in the newspapers, of a child being absolutely killed, at Birmingham, I think it was, by being thus frightened.  The parents had gone out into what is called an evening party.  The servants, naturally enough, had their party at home; and the mistress, who, by some unexpected accident, had been brought home at an early hour, finding the parlour full of company, ran up stairs to see about her child, about two or three years old.  She found it with its eyes open, but fixed; touching it, she found it inanimate.  The doctor was sent for in vain:  it was quite dead.  The maid affected to know nothing of the cause; but some one of the parties assembled discovered, pinned up to the curtains of the bed, a horrid figure, made up partly of a frightful mask!  This, as the wretched girl confessed, had been done to keep the child quiet, while she was with her company below.  When one reflects on the anguish that the poor little thing must have endured, before the life was quite frightened out of it, one can find no terms sufficiently strong to express the abhorrence due to the perpetrator of this crime, which was, in fact, a cruel murder; and, if it was beyond the reach of the law, it was so and is so, because, as in the cases of parricide, the law, in making no provision for punishment peculiarly severe, has, out of respect to human nature, supposed such crimes to be impossible.  But if the girl was criminal; if death, or a life of remorse, was her due, what was the due of her parents, and especially of the mother!  And what was the due of the father, who suffered that mother, and who, perhaps, tempted her to neglect her most sacred duty!

270.  If this poor child had been deprived of its mental faculties, instead of being deprived of its life, the cause would, in all likelihood, never have been discovered.  The insanity would have been ascribed to ‘brain-fever,’ or to some other of the usual causes of insanity; or, as in thousands upon thousands of instances, to some unaccountable cause.  When I was, in No.  IX., paragraphs from 227 to 233, both inclusive, maintaining with all my might, the unalienable right of the child to the milk of its mother, I omitted, amongst the evils arising from banishing the child from the mother’s breast, to mention, or, rather, it had never occurred to me to mention, the loss of reason to the