Infants and children are not addicted to the many weakening and enervating practices so common among adults. For instance we cannot accuse any infant of bringing on enervation and toxemia by the tobacco habit or by sexual excesses or over work or jealously, etc. Babies are subjected to many adverse influences, but probably the worst of these is over feeding, or improper food.

A friend writes from New York that her little child was very sick, but had recovered. She adds: "she was gaining in weight so nicely. Looked fine, and everybody remarked how lovely she looked, and how pretty she was getting and then she had to get sick and lose weight again."

Acute illness as a means of casting off excess lard, is nature's preferred method. Nature really doesn't admire a fat baby, as misguided parents do.

The lady then tells of her boy, age about eight, that he "was having a terrible time with his teeth--had cavities that sure gave him trouble. I started him off with a dentist--already had two extractions and one tooth filled; will have two more extracted soon."

She then adds that she also had to have dental work done. She is on the sunny side of thirty and had $63 worth of dental work done at one time. She adds: "I haven't been feeling well for a long time. I don't know what the trouble is. Almost every day I have a headache--don't feel like myself at all. I am afraid to go to a doctor because it generally ends wilt an operation (of which she has had several), or something just as bad.

Her husband is also troubled in various ways. The whole family from the baby to the oldest member is sick and ailing Why? The medical profession answers, "germs." I say, and I know how they live, it is a very faulty mode of living particularly a faulty diet.

Children are frequently made into a veritable dumping ground for all the various patented foods, emulsions, and even drugs that clever advertisers offer to the public and to physicians.

They are victims of the fallacy that they require lots of fats and sugars and starches, which has evolved the present one-sided and deficient diet. This diet is virtually robbed of mineral salts and vitamins and then doctors and parents add a few teaspoonsful of tomato juice, or orange juice and nauseous cod-liver oil to this diet, to make up for its deficiencies. Cod-liver oil and other fatty emulsions added to a diet already over-burdened with fat only helps to make the child sick.

"Infants are kept in arms, rocked, tossed, trotted, and stuffed with food, in a vain effort to keep them quiet," when they are suffering from surfeit, and the older child is fed in season and out on a diet that is more in the nature of a poison than of food.

Everywhere one goes he sees children eating cookies, candies, crackers, ice cream and other worthless things. "With hands full of cookies and pockets full of peanuts" they gorge and stuff, filling their little bodies full of these acid-forming foods and robbing their tissues of their precious alkaline elements.

I recently saw a little child pick up a luscious ripe cherry in. a fruit store and start to eat it. Her mother immediately said "Don't put that in your mouth; it is not good for you. I will give you a cake when we get outside, but don't eat that."

Such lamentable ignorance! Most people deserve to lose their children. My sympathies are for the children. Any parent can have the truth about the proper care of children who will seek to acquire it. Most of them are too brain-lazy and indifferent. It is so much easier to follow traditions and customs.

If this mother desired to teach her child not to take fruit from the stores, she certainly went at it the wrong way. The idea that she conveyed to the child was not, that it should not take the fruit, because it should never take that which belongs to another; but that she should not eat the fruit, because it was not good for her--would make her sick.