The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

THE BATTLE OF LIFE.

681

with the simplest material laws, and learns to obey them.
He enters on a scene of more or less conflict as soon as he
is born. To acquire any considerable self-knowledge and
self-control, to understand the social environment into which
he is born, with its civil, industrial, and economic laws, only
intensifies the struggle, and lifts the campaign to a higher
warfare.
Not only is the child ignorant of himself at birth, but he
is entrusted to the care of parents and guardians who are
wofully lacking in the same kind of knowledge. He does
not come into the world with a bill of items, that state his
mental and moral make-up. If we could know in advance
what were his mental and moral qualities, in what direction
he was richly endowed, and in what he was weak, in what
part of his nature he needed to be fortified, and in what to
be restrained, we might be wiser in our educational training.
But in our ignorance we put one in the shop whom nature
intended for the studio, and force another through college
whose tastes would have taken him to the farm and cattle-ranch, and so poorly equip both for the battle of life.
We load them down with a mass of crude misinformation,
which they unlearn before they have attained their majority,
and throw away as useless impedimenta.
The newly-born child is not an original creature, as we
sometimes assume; he is not the first of a series. Instead of
this, he is one of a long series that reaches far back into a prehistoric antiquity, and there are in him hereditary tendencies,
which have come down to him from progenitors of whom
he never heard. And as by a general law of heredity, "the
inheritance of traits of character is persistent in proportion
to the length of time they have been inherited," it is easy
to account for the fact, that in members of the same family
there reappear incongruities of physique and of mentality,