Teachers, lawyers, and doctors are as bad as the preachers. We must avoid "night air," and draughts, and getting our feet wet, and not eating enough, and eating too much. We must not eat this and that, and must not do that or the other. Fear is instilled into our minds all along the pathway of life until if we are not healthy enough to throw it away and live our own fearless life, we are weighted down by the burden of our needless and senseless fears. All quack doctors work on the foolish and ignorant fears of the people, or their nostrums would never sell enough to pay a thousandth part of what their advertising costs. Fear is the club that scoundrels use to beat the ignorant into paying tribute to them. I do not believe in these fears--to me they are all bad, and nothing but bad. I would banish every one of them from the human heart. But, says an objector, you surely would not let your child go and handle a deadly rattlesnake, or send your growing and innocent girl into the company of expert _roués_, or willfully sleep in a miasmic atmosphere, or inhale the poisonous gases of a badly cared-for plumbing system? Of course not. But neither would I be afraid of them. There is all the difference in the world between _knowledge of danger_, and _fear_ of that danger. Let a child be taught definitely and positively the danger of handling a rattlesnake, but do not fill his soul with fear of it; impress forcefully and strongly the wisdom of avoiding evil company upon your daughter, but teach her to be absolutely fearless in the presence of the debauchee; seek to the full how to avoid all miasma and deadly plumbing, but be fearless about them. Fear is the product of ignorance; fearlessness of knowledge. If my child knows all the harm a rattlesnake can do, and all the power it possesses, he can avoid it as easily as not. Therefore why should he be afraid? The feminine fears of mice, rats, spiders, and snakes are evidences either of ignorance, or of a developed hereditary tendency to fear. In the former case the fearful one should be trained so as to remove her fear, in the latter she should resolutely set her will to work to overcome it, in which all her friends should sympathetically aid her. Fear has ever been the foe of progress. Every advance step in all life has been taken by him only who had throttled his fears. Fire was conquered for the human race by the man who dared brave the strange and weird flames that grew and then disappeared. Prometheus--the fearless--is the type of all who have helped the race to progress. It is the same in every field of endeavor, on every plane of thought. Galileo, Newton, Savonarola, the barons of King John's time, Cromwell, Luther, Bacon, Captain Cook, Washington, Lincoln are but a few of the thousands of names of men who have dared, who have bid their fears depart, and in so doing have advanced the human race.