If injuries so conspicuous are thus frequent, how very general must be the smaller, and inconspicuous injuries!  To one case where positive illness is traceable to over-application, there are probably at least half-a-dozen cases where the evil is unobtrusive and slowly accumulating—­cases where there is frequent derangement of the functions, attributed to this or that special cause, or to constitutional delicacy; cases where there is retardation and premature arrest of bodily growth; cases where a latent tendency to consumption is brought out and established; cases where a predisposition is given to that now common cerebral disorder brought on by the labour of adult life.  How commonly health is thus undermined, will be clear to all who, after noting the frequent ailments of hard-worked professional and mercantile men, will reflect on the much worse effects which undue application must produce on the undeveloped systems of children.  The young can bear neither so much hardship, nor so much physical exertion, nor so much mental exertion, as the full grown.  Judge, then, if the full grown manifestly suffer from the excessive mental exertion required of them, how great must be the damage which a mental exertion, often equally excessive, inflicts on the young!

Indeed, when we examine the merciless school drill frequently enforced, the wonder is, not that it does extreme injury, but that it can be borne at all.  Take the instance given by Sir John Forbes, from personal knowledge; and which he asserts, after much inquiry, to be an average sample of the middle-class girls’-school system throughout England.  Omitting detailed divisions of time, we quote the summary of the twenty-four hours.

In bed 9 hours (the younger 10)
In school, at their studies and tasks 9 "
In school, or in the house, the elder at
    optional studies or work, the younger at
    play 31/2 " (the younger 21/2)
At meals 11/2 "
Exercise in the open air, in the shape of a
    formal walk, often with lesson-books in
    hand, and even this only when the weather
    is fine at the appointed time. 1 "
                                             ——­
                                              24

And what are the results of this “astounding regimen,” as Sir John Forbes terms it?  Of course feebleness, pallor, want of spirits, general ill-health.  But he describes something more.  This utter disregard of physical welfare, out of extreme anxiety to cultivate the mind—­this prolonged exercise of brain and deficient exercise of limbs,—­he found to be habitually followed, not only by disordered functions but by malformation.  He says:—­“We lately visited, in a large town, a boarding-school containing forty girls; and we learnt, on close and accurate inquiry, that there was not one of the girl who had been at the school two years (and the majority had been as long) that was not more or less crooked!"[8]