It is pitiful, this dwarfing of American children with improper food, want of exercise, and cork-screw clothes. It is inhuman to require of their enfeebled minds and bodies, in ill-ventilated schoolrooms, tasks which the most vigorous child should never have imposed upon his tender years. As if a child’s physique were not of the first importance!--as if all the learning in the world could be put to any practical use by an enfeebled body! As if a parent _had a right_, year after year, thus to murder the innocents. Think of one of those candy-and-cake-fed young girls, bending over her tasks in school, from nine o’clock till three, with perhaps ten or fifteen minutes intermission (spent in the close air of the school-room) and two days out of a week at three, after another ten minutes’ intermission, and another cake-and-candy feed, commencing drawing, or music lessons, to last till five; her mother, meanwhile, rocking away as comfortably, in her chair at home, as if her daughter’s spine were not crooking irretrievably. I will not speak of the utter impossibility that this young girl should have a _steady hand_ for drawing, under such circumstances, because any fool can understand that to be impossible. I ask what _right_ have you to require of your child, your growing, restless child, what it would be impossible for you to do yourself? You know very well that you could not keep your mind on the stretch for so many hours to any profit; or your body in one position for such a length of time, without excessive pain and untold weariness. Then add to this the tasks which must be conned on the return home for the next day’s lesson, and one marvels no longer at the sickly, sallow, narrow-chested, leaden-eyed young girls we are in the habit of meeting. What _would_ I have? I would have teachers less selfishly consult their own convenience, in insisting upon squeezing into the forenoon what should be divided between forenoon and afternoon, as in the good old-fashioned way of keeping school, with time to eat a wholesome dinner between. A teacher’s established constitution may possibly stand this modern nonsense (though I am told not long); but that _children_ should be thus victimized, without at least a remonstrance on the part of their natural guardians, I can only ascribe to the criminal indifference of parents to the welfare of their offspring. LADY DOCTORS.