best for other people. If I fail to fulfil this promise, no doubt
I am to blame; but if I fulfil my promise, it is your own fault if
you ask anything more of me, for I have promised you nothing more.




BOOK I

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become
evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree
to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place,
and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his
slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is
deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it,
not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse,
and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden.
Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot
be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself
from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice,
authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which
we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her
place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the
highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

Tender, anxious mother, [Footnote: The earliest education is
most important and it undoubtedly is woman's work. If the author
of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them
milk to feed the child. Address your treatises on education to the
women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than