The history of small-pox in Australia, 1788-1908 / compiled from various sources by J.H.L Clumpston.

Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of small-pox in Australia, 1788-1908 / compiled from various sources by J.H.L Clumpston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    cacodgemons of the intelligence as these, progenerating still, that become the most deadly and efficient impediments to human progress, that frustrate the full expansion and the free exercise of the young plastic intellect, and render it incompetent in the years of maturity to exert its noblest faculty—the power to discriminate between the true and the false of the things of life. Minds thus hemmed in are little qualified to correct faults in their own judgments, or to deduce sound conclusions from the propositions of the worldly ethics reduced to practice everywhere around them. The essential object of all education is to instruct the young mind in what is true. As times go, deception mingles with and tarnishes all the pursuits of man ; and it is to enable the young mind to discover the elements of truth, and separate them from what is untrue of things, that a higher order of instruction than public schools now, or at lea.s'r, lately, were capable of imparting. Error in the youthful processes of thought, whether resulting from absolute ignorance or from mis-construction left to grow up and ripen into convictions, become in the course of time habits of the mind ; and, consequently, through the adapting contrivance of nature, they are transmitted, like physical blemishes, from mother to child, till at last they grow into positive idiosyncrasies of the mental constitution, reproducing in their turn corresponding intellectual obliquities, acting more or less injuriously on the issues of life. And it is these conditions of ignorance, or a jejune culture of the mother's understanding' which stimulates the moral sentiments of all classes of society, the rich as well as the poor, to revolt—as exemplified in the question of vaccination—against some of their dearest interests. It is ignorance—not the baser impulses of the human heart—which is the true cause of that otherwise unaccountable antagonism which the uneducated mosth% but not a few of the educated also, so frequently set up against the progress of those scientific improvements whom chief tendencies are towards their own happiness and the amelioration of their own condition ; and until the fogs which hang so dense and heavy over the mental vision of the benighted classes shall have been dissipated by the brightening rays of actual knowledge operating on the female mind, philanthropy may shed her tears in vain. If the daughters of the working classes were taught at public schools something more practical, deep, and lasting than a routine of flimsy coaching to exaggerate their ordinary surface-painting, and render it splendent and fascinating at examinations ; if they were taught some lessons in logic, or the principles of common sense methodized, and their reasoning powers thereby expanded, and their thoughts trained to habits of order in their examination of any disputable points in the realities of life coming under their scrutiny, as well as in giving accurate expressions to them in language ; if they were led on, by easy graduations, to investigate without restriction, any of the established popular theories, opinions, beliefs, prejudgments, &c., which interest, perplex, or inform the understanding ; nay, if they were subjected to an elementary course of mathematics, including algebra, but without ascending to the higher abstractions of the science—and I see neither anything startling in the suggestion, nor why this might not be substituted for some of the less important or necessary branches of female study, as it would only take the place and time of Latin or Greek with boys, and would both sharpen and habituate their understandings more than anything they can learn, in the accurate discrimination of right and wrong on whatever concerned their moral or physical interests, in short, to be practical and domestic, if they were enabled by suitable instruction to reason out to first principles the why and the wherefore of all things that are likely in any way to influence the concerns of their future sphere of action in this jumble of sighs and tears which constitutes the volume of human life, then, and only then, would they be fitted to become both worthy mothers and indefatigable propagators of the soundest form of human knowledge to succeeding generations. These, with a general view of national philosophy, would suffice. Maidens thus trained would find no difficulty, when they become mothers, in comprehending why gloomy prejudices and misconceptions of every name, quality, and degree of power over the affairs of the world, are inimical to social happiness, and the source of inconceivable mischiefs ; and by the same light, they would learn the reasons why the salutary and protective effects of vaccination are urged so earnestly and per- sistently upon them, as embracing one of the most momentous interests of the human family. There is nothing so precious in life as the proper culture of a girl's understanding, and no consideration on earth should weigh the value of a feather against the full and accurate measure of education being meted out to her, I trust, the future regenerator of the human race. It is only by instructing mothers, that the seeds of sound and useful knowledge and a pure morality can ever be disseminated and made to take permanent root. Enlighten thoroughly the maternal mind, and the husband and the children will not remain long in darkness. The reason is as obvious as the writing on the wall.