Emile | Page 7

The child exhausts his strength in vain struggles,
or he gains strength very slowly. He was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has
gained nothing by birth.
The inaction, the constraint to which the child's limbs are subjected can only check the
circulation of the blood and humours; it can only hinder the child's growth in size and
strength, and injure its constitution. Where these absurd precautions are absent, all the
men are tall, strong, and well-made. Where children are swaddled, the country swarms
with the hump-backed, the lame, the bow-legged, the rickety, and every kind of
deformity. In our fear lest the body should become deformed by free movement, we
hasten to deform it by putting it in a press. We make our children helpless lest they
should hurt themselves.
Is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and temper? Their first feeling is
one of pain and suffering; they find every necessary movement hampered; more
miserable than a galley slave, in vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry. Their
first words you say are tears. That is so. From birth you are always checking them, your
first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture. Their voice alone is free; why should
they not raise it in complaint? They cry because you are hurting them; if you were
swaddled you would cry louder still.
What is the origin of this senseless and unnatural custom? Since mothers have despised
their first duty and refused to nurse their own children, they have had to be entrusted to

hired nurses. Finding themselves the mothers of a stranger's children, without the ties of
nature, they have merely tried to save themselves trouble. A child unswaddled would
need constant watching; well swaddled it is cast into a corner and its cries are unheeded.
So long as the nurse's negligence escapes notice, so long as the nursling does not break its
arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a weakling for life. Its limbs are kept safe
at the expense of its body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse's fault.
These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the
pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages?
If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left
crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. Children have been found in
this position purple in the face, their tightly bandaged chest forbade the circulation of the
blood, and it went to the head; so the sufferer was considered very quiet because he had
not strength to cry. How long a child might survive under such conditions I do not know,
but it could not be long. That, I fancy, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling
clothes.
It is maintained that unswaddled infants would assume faulty positions and make
movements which might injure the proper development of their limbs. That is one of the
empty arguments of our false wisdom which has never been confirmed by experience.
Out of all the crowds of children who grow up with the full use of their limbs among
nations wiser than ourselves, you never find one who hurts himself or maims himself;
their movements are too feeble to be dangerous, and when they assume an injurious
position, pain warns them to change it.
We have not yet decided to swaddle our kittens and puppies; are they any the worse for
this neglect? Children are heavier, I admit, but they are also weaker. They can scarcely
move, how could they hurt themselves! If you lay them on their backs, they will lie there
till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over. Not content with having ceased to
suckle their children, women no longer wish to do it; with the natural result motherhood
becomes a burden; means are found to avoid it. They will destroy their work to begin it
over again, and they thus turn to the injury of the race the charm which was given them
for its increase. This practice, with other causes of depopulation, forbodes the coming
fate of Europe. Her arts and sciences, her philosophy and morals, will shortly reduce her
to a desert. She will be the home of wild beasts, and her inhabitants will hardly have
changed for the worse.
I have sometimes watched the tricks of young wives who pretend that they wish to nurse
their own children. They take care to be dissuaded from this whim. They contrive that
husbands, doctors, and especially mothers should intervene. If a husband should let his
wife nurse her own baby it would