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