The Essential Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
that this useless art is worse than useless, since it wastes time, men, and things on what is pure loss. Not only must we deduct the time spent, not in using life, but preserving it, but if this time is spent in tormenting ourselves it is worse than wasted, it is so much to the bad, and to reckon fairly a corresponding share must be deducted from what remains to us. A man who lives ten years for himself and others without the help of doctors lives more for himself and others than one who spends thirty years as their victim. I have tried both, so I think I have a better right than most to draw my own conclusions.
For these reasons I decline to take any but a strong and healthy pupil, and these are my principles for keeping him in health. I will not stop to prove at length the value of manual labour and bodily exercise for strengthening the health and constitution; no one denies it. Nearly all the instances of long life are to be found among the men who have taken most exercise, who have endured fatigue and labour. 7 Neither will I enter into details as to the care I shall take for this alone. It will be clear that it forms such an essential part of my practice that it is enough to get hold of the idea without further explanation.
When our life begins our needs begin too. The new-born infant must have a nurse. If his mother will do her duty, so much the better; her instructions will be given her in writing, but this advantage has its drawbacks, it removes the tutor from his charge. But it is to be hoped that the child's own interests, and her respect for the person to whom she is about to confide so precious a treasure, will induce the mother to follow the master's wishes, and whatever she does you may be sure she will do better than another. If we must have a strange nurse, make a good choice to begin with.
It is one of the misfortunes of the rich to be cheated on all sides; what wonder they think ill of mankind! It is riches that corrupt men, and the rich are rightly the first to feel the defects of the only tool they know. Everything is ill-done for them, except what they do themselves, and they do next to nothing. When a nurse must be selected the choice is left to the doctor. What happens? The best nurse is the one who offers the highest bribe. I shall not consult the doctor about Emile's nurse, I shall take care to choose her myself. I may not argue about it so elegantly as the surgeon, but I shall be more reliable, I shall be less deceived by my zeal than the doctor by his greed.
There is no mystery about this choice; its rules are well known, but I think we ought probably to pay more attention to the age of the milk as well as its quality. The first milk is watery, it must be almost an aperient, to purge the remains of the meconium curdled in the bowels of the new-born child. Little by little the milk thickens and supplies more solid food as the child is able to digest it. It is surely not without cause that nature changes the milk in the female of every species according to the age of the offspring.
Thus a new-born child requires a nurse who has recently become mother. There is, I know, a difficulty here, but as soon as we leave the path of nature there are difficulties in the way of all well-doing. The wrong course is the only right one under the circumstances, so we take it.
The nurse must be healthy alike in disposition and in body. The violence of the passions as well as the humours may spoil her milk. Moreover, to consider the body only is to keep only half our aim in view. The milk may be good and the nurse bad; a good character is as necessary as a good constitution. If you choose a vicious person, I do not say her foster-child will acquire her vices, but he will suffer for them. Ought she not to bestow on him day by day, along with her milk, a care which calls for zeal, patience, gentleness, and cleanliness. If she is intemperate and greedy her milk will soon be spoilt; if she is careless and hasty what will become of a poor little wretch left to her mercy, and unable either to protect himself or to complain. The wicked are never good for anything.
The choice is all the more important because her foster-child should have no other guardian, just as he should have no teacher but his tutor. This was the custom of the ancients, who talked less but acted more wisely than we. The nurse never left her foster-daughter; this is why the nurse is the confidante in most of their plays. A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up.
At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined. A child should know no betters but its father and mother, or failing them its foster-mother and its tutor, and even this is one too many, but this division is inevitable, and the best that can be done in the way of remedy is that the man and woman who control him shall be so well agreed with regard to him that they seem like one.
The nurse must live rather more comfortably, she must have rather more substantial food, but her whole way of living must not be altered, for a sudden change, even a change for the better, is dangerous to health, and since her usual way of life has made her healthy and strong, why change it?
Country women eat less meat and more vegetables than towns-women, and this vegetarian diet seems favourable rather than otherwise to themselves and their children. When they take nurslings from the upper classes they eat meat and broth with the idea that they will form better chyle and supply more milk. I do not hold with this at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find children fed in this way less liable to colic and worms.
That need not surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter.8 Milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal, is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali like animal matter, it gives a neutral salt like plants.
The milk of herbivorous creatures is sweeter and more wholesome than the milk of the carnivorous; formed of a substance similar to its own, it keeps its goodness and becomes less liable to putrifaction. If quantity is considered, it is well known that farinaceous foods produce more blood than meat, so they ought to yield more milk. If a child were not weaned too soon, and if it were fed on vegetarian food, and its foster-mother were a vegetarian, I do not think it would be troubled with worms.
Milk derived from vegetable foods may perhaps be more liable to go sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food; whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There are constitutions which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents. People are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. This is how it becomes sufficiently solid to nourish children and young animals; if it did not curdle it would merely pass away without feeding them.9 In vain you dilute milk and use absorbents; whoever swallows milk digests cheese, this rule is without exception; rennet is made from a calf's stomach.
Instead of changing the nurse's usual diet, I think it would be enough to give food in larger quantities and better of its kind. It is not the nature of the food that makes a vegetable diet indigestible, but the flavouring that makes it unwholesome. Reform your cookery, use neither butter nor oil for frying. Butter, salt, and milk should never be cooked. Let your vegetables be cooked in water and only seasoned when they come to table. The vegetable diet, far from disturbing the nurse, will give her a plentiful supply of milk.10 If a vegetable diet is best for the child, how can meat food be best for his nurse? The things are contradictory.
Fresh air affects children's constitutions, particularly in early years. It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has a powerful effect on their young bodies. Its effects can never be destroyed. So I should not agree with those who take a country woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and her nursling with her. I would rather send him to breathe the fresh air of the country than the foul air of the town. He will take his new mother's position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor will follow him. The reader will bear in mind that this tutor is not a paid servant, but the father's friend. But if this friend cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none