The development of their physical strength makes complaint less necessary to children. When able to help themselves, they have less need of the help of others. Knowledge to direct their strength grows with that strength. At this second stage the life of the individual properly begins; he now becomes conscious of his own being. Memory extends this feeling of personal identity to every moment of his existence; he becomes really one, the same one, and consequently capable of happiness or of misery. We must therefore, from this moment, begin to regard him as a moral being. Childhood is to be Loved. Although the longest term of human life, and the probability, at any given age, of reaching this term, have been computed, nothing is more uncertain than the continuance of each individual life: very few attain the maximum. The greatest risks in life are at its beginning; the less one has lived, the less prospect he has of living. Of all children born, only about half reach youth; and it is probable that your pupil may never attain to manhood. What, then, must be thought of that barbarous education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, loads the child with every description of fetters, and begins, by making him wretched, to prepare for him some far-away indefinite happiness he may never enjoy! Even supposing the object of such an education reasonable, how can we without indignation see the unfortunate creatures bowed under an insupportable yoke, doomed to constant labor like so many galley-slaves, without any certainty that all this toil will ever be of use to them! The years that ought to be bright and cheerful are passed in tears amid punishments, threats, and slavery. For his own good, the unhappy child is tortured; and the death thus summoned will seize on him unperceived amidst all this melancholy preparation. Who knows how many children die on account of the extravagant prudence of a father or of a teacher? Happy in escaping his cruelty, it gives them one advantage; they leave without regret a life which they know only from its darker side.[2]