“Parents,” said a cross-grained old maid, “are wholly incapable of bringing up their children. They have no judgment, no steadiness; at one moment whipping them without rhyme or reason, and the next soothing them with candy, and smothering them with caresses. They impart to them their own tempers, passions, weaknesses, and prejudices. There should be established infant schools at the public expense, where all the children, as soon as twelve months old, should be placed, and brought up by proper persons trained and prepared in normal schools for that purpose.” “You will have to go farther back than that, my good woman,” said Mr. Long, an English gentleman just arrived in the country and announced as the Prophet of the Newness. “Children are born with an inclination to evil, and are hardly born before they manifest vicious tempers and a fondness for doing precisely what they ought not to do. If suffered to have their own way, they would never live to grow up. They must, as they are now born, be restrained and even whipped, for their own good. Here the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. We must begin with the parents. We live in a depraved state, and children inherit vitiated moral and physical constitutions from their fathers and mothers. We must look to this fact, and sternly prohibit all persons of obviously vitiated moral or physical constitutions from begetting or bearing children. After that we must turn our attention to improving the breed, as our English farmers have done in the case of their horses, oxen, cows, sheep, swine, dogs, and hens.” “That may be rather difficult to manage in a free country,” said Dr. Muzzleton, a professor of Surgery in a Western medical college, “and can hardly be tried, except by the master with his negroes on our Southern plantations. The hopes of philanthropists must rest on something more practical, and less difficult to be accomplished. The philanthropist’s dependence is on dietetic reform. The vitiated moral and physical constitution of parents, and which they impart to their children, comes unquestionably from the use of animal food. It is necessary, therefore, to abolish the use of animal food, and have people feed only on a vegetable diet. Nature shows this in the very construction of the human teeth, which are very different from those of the lion, the tiger, and other carniverous animals. Carnivorous animals have no grinders, and their teeth are fitted only for tearing. Man has incisors and molars, which shows that he was intended to cut and grind his food.” “But which serve him very well, since he does not usually eat flesh raw, but cooks it,” remarked Mr. Merton. “But the antediluvians eat no flesh. They lived on a vegetable diet, were vegetarians, and yet they became so corrupt that the Almighty sent a flood and destroyed them all, with the exception of eight persons.” “Where do you learn that?” asked Dr. Muzzleton. “From the Bible and tradition,” replied Mr. Merton.