Those processes were numerous
but simple. Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through
eyes, through finger-tips, all through those early years when
eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect.
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony,
was married at seventeen. His parents were not only willing, but
aiding and abetting. They considered him a man.
Mercy Otis, in Revolutionary days, in Massachusetts, the wife of
the patriot, James Warren, and Abigail Smith, the wife of the
future president, John Adams, both married before twenty. A study
of their lives will show that at that age they were mature.
To-day, in Boston, a woman of twenty is considered so immature
that many of the hospitals will not admit her even to her
preliminary training for the trade of nurse till she has added at
least three years more to her mental development.
Who has thus prolonged infancy; who has thus postponed maturity?
No individual.
Science has done part of it.
By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution
of the compact industries of the home through the scattered,
innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has
given us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and
distant one.
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