securely passed.

Food, warmth, cleanliness and abundant fresh air there must be from the
first, and unremitting attention, such attention as only love can
sustain. And in addition there must be knowledge. It is a pleasant
superstition that Nature (who in such connections becomes feminine and
assumes a capital N) is to be trusted in these matters. It is a
pleasant superstition to which, some of us, under the agreeable
counsels of sentimental novelists, of thoughtless mercenary preachers,
and ignorant and indolent doctors, have offered up a child or so. We
are persuaded to believe that a mother has an instinctive knowledge of
whatever is necessary for a child's welfare, and the child, until it
reaches the knuckle-rapping age at least, an instinctive knowledge of
its own requirements. Whatever proceedings are most suggestive of an
ideal naked savage leading a "natural" life, are supposed to be not
only more advantageous to the child but in some mystical way more
moral. The spectacle of an undersized porter-fed mother, for example,
nursing a spotted and distressful baby, is exalted at the expense of
the clean and simple artificial feeding that is often advisable to-day.
Yet the mortality of first-born children should indicate that a modern
woman carries no instinctive system of baby management about with her
in her brain, even if her savage ancestress had anything of the sort,
and both the birth rate and the infantile death rate of such noble
savages as our civilization has any chance of observing, suggest a
certain generous carelessness, a certain spacious indifference to
individual misery, rather than a trustworthy precision of individual
guidance about Nature's way.

This cant of Nature's trustworthiness is partly a survival of the day
of Rousseau and Sturm (of the Reflections), when untravelled men,