from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from
the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the
rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary
confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic
aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of
the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to
resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no
control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost
unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly
unconscious motives of their elders... The present volume abounds in
evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is
monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and
that it should be taken into account...