“In the first place, your social, industrial and sexual conditions of nearly all your parents, and especially of your mothers, are so pitiful that it is scarcely possible for them to bring forth descendants with a kind, pleasant disposition. The parental silence, crabbedness, toil, care and ill-temper concomitant with your present conditions, are generally stamped on the child’s countenance and grafted in its constitution long before it is born. The people of earth quarrel and fight too much among yourselves, with your neighbors, and with nations to produce and rear a gentle, non-aggressive, peace-loving child. You must remember that all social beings are teachers, either for good or for bad. The home and daily social intercourse are the most effective school. Just as the adult is, nearly so will the child be. If the adult is jealous, aggressive, ignorant, superstitious, dishonest, intemperate, and rude in his conduct, so will the child be. Hence our principal object in education should be to educate _ourselves_. “After birth, especially during the first stages of infancy, your care and attention given to the mother and child is almost always inadequate and improper. The care, toil, anxiety, ill-health, your pernicious sex-relations, and very frequently the poverty of your mothers generally affect for ill the maternal nourishment given to the child. By this early lesson, the child, through the instrumentality of its food, becomes partly like its mother from the effects of its mother’s bad condition. Thus its pernicious education begins at an age when the child is yet unconscious of its surroundings. Your practice of rocking a child is also a bad lesson. “When your child gets a little older, I notice that nearly all your parents teach their babies, in an unconscious way, to become cry-babies and bawlers; this assertion may seem strange to many of you, but it is nevertheless a fact. “I have noticed in my travels thousands of children, some younger and some older, that would set up a cry as soon as the mother would appear in their presence or sit down, and no doubt all of you have seen the same. You see the cry-baby has discovered that its mother or some one else will take it up as soon as it sets up a cry. With this cry-weapon, it has been successful so often that it will constantly employ it as a means to gain its end, and every such successful effort makes the cry louder and longer and more frequent, if necessary.