THE COLLEGE, THE MARKET,
AND
THE COURT;

OR,

WOMAN'S RELATION TO EDUCATION, LABOR, AND LAW.

By CAROLINE H. DALL,

AUTHOR OF "HISTORICAL SKETCHES," "SUNSHINE," "THE LIFE OF DR. ZAKRZEWSKA," ETC.

"Let this be copied out,
And keep it safe for our remembrance.
Return the precedent to these lords again."—King John.

"How canst thou make me thy friend who in nothing am like thee?
Thy life and dwelling are under the waters; but my way of living
Is to eat all that man does!"—Batrachomyomachia.

BOSTON:
LEE AND SHEPARD.
1867.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by

LEE AND SHEPARD,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE:

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON.

TO

LUCRETIA MOTT,

FOR MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS A PREACHER AND REFORMER; SPOTLESS
ALIKE IN ALL PUBLIC AND PRIVATE RELATIONS; WHOSE
CHILDREN'S GRANDCHILDREN RISE UP TO
CALL HER BLESSED;

This Book is Dedicated,

SINCE SHE IS THE BEST EXAMPLE THAT I KNOW OF WHAT ALL WOMEN
MAY AND SHOULD BECOME.

"A woman
Leading with sober pace an armed man,
All bossed in gold, and thus the superscription:
'I, Justice, bring this injured exile back
To claim his portion in his father's hall.'"

Seven against Thebes.

A PREFACE

TO BE READ AFTER THE BOOK.

When, some years ago, I delivered nine lectures upon the Condition of Woman, I had no intention of printing them until time had matured my judgments and justified my conclusions. Peculiar circumstances afterwards induced me to modify this decision. The first course of lectures, now printed as "The College," had proved unexpectedly popular, and was many times repeated. At its close, I announced the second course upon Labor, involving the subject of Prostitution as the result of Low Wages; and a very unexpected opposition ensued. My files can still show the large number of letters I received, beseeching me not to touch this subject; and private intercession followed, on the part of those I hold wisest and most dear, to the same effect. Why I did not yield to all the clamor, I cannot tell,—except that I was not working for myself nor of myself.

I thought it, however, necessary to take unusual precautions to prevent these lectures from being misunderstood. I wrote private notes, enclosing tickets, to almost all the leading clergymen, asking that they would attend them as a personal favor to myself. I believe I did not allude to the efforts which had been made to silence me, except when I wrote to those who had joined in the outcry. In that case, I demanded the attendance as an act of justice. These notes were kindly responded to; and grateful tears started to my eyes, when I found on the seats before me white-haired men, who set aside their prejudices for my sake. Whatever might have been thought before, the delivery of the lectures silenced all objections. They were fully attended and frequently repeated; and I followed the delivery by the printing of this particular course, in order that misunderstandings should not have time to establish themselves. The book was well received, both at home and abroad. Letters came to me from the far shores of India and Africa, thanking me for its publication. The first edition was sold at once; and I should have reprinted the book, but that I did not wish to re-issue these lectures in an isolated form. I wanted them reprinted, if at all, in their proper place, subordinated to my main thought.

I smile a little as I look back. The remonstrances upon my file, dated less than ten years ago, would now be earnestly repudiated by the dear friends who wrote them.

After the delivery of the third course, upon Law, local reasons decided the publication of that book. Many efforts were being made in the different States to change laws; and it was thought that the lectures would give necessary information.

Of the first course, nothing has ever been printed in this country. The second lecture was printed, by a sympathizing friend in England, as a tract, and widely circulated. Part of it was reprinted with approbation in the "Englishwoman's Journal." The whole of this course is now given to American readers in its proper connection, in which it is hoped, that its bearing upon the later lectures will be seen, and a new significance given to its suggestions. The history of these volumes seems to make it necessary to reprint the original Prefaces in connection with the lectures on Labor and Law.

In 1856, I conceived the thought of twelve lectures, to be written concerning Woman; to embrace, in four series of three each, all that I felt moved to say in relation to her interests. No one knew better than myself that they would be only "twelve baskets of fragments gathered up;" but I could not distrust the Divine Love which still feeds the multitudes, who wander in the desert, with "five loaves and two small fishes."

In the first three of these lectures, I stated woman's claim to a civil position, and asked that power should be given her, under a professedly republican government, to protect herself. In them I thus stated the argument on which I should proceed: "The right to education—that is, the right to the education or drawing-out of all the faculties God has given—involves the right to a choice of vocation; that is, the right to a choice of the end to which those faculties shall be trained. The choice of vocation necessarily involves the protection of that vocation,—the right to decide how far legislative action shall control it; in one word, the right to the elective franchise."

Proceeding upon this formula, I delivered, in 1858, a course of lectures stating "Woman's Claim to Education;" and this season I have condensed my thoughts upon the freedom of vocations into the three following lectures. There are still to be completed three lectures on "Woman's Civil Disabilities." I should prefer to unite the twelve lectures in a single publication; but reasons of imperative force have induced me to hurry the printing of these "Essays on Labor." Neither Education nor Civil Disability can dispute the public interest with this subject. No one can know better than myself upon what wide information, what thorough mental discipline, all considerations in regard to it should be based. I have tried to keep my work within the compass of my ability, and, without seeking rigid exactness of detail, to apply common sense and right reason to problems which beset every woman's path. At the very threshold of my work, I confronted a painful task. Before I could press the necessity of exertion, before I could plead that labor might be honored in the public eye, I felt that I must show some cause for the terrible earnestness with which I was moved; and I could only do it by facing boldly the question of "Death or Dishonor?"

"Why not leave it to be understood?" some persons may object. "Why not leave such work to man?" the public may continue.

In answer to the first question, I would say, that very few women have much knowledge of this "perishing class," except those actually engaged in ministering to its despair; and that the information I have given is drawn from wholly reliable sources, as the reader may see, but can be obtained only by hours—nay, days and weeks—of painful and exhausting study. Very gladly have I saved my audience that necessity: greatly have I abbreviated whatever I have quoted. But I meant to drive home the reality of that wretchedness: I wanted the women to whom I spoke to feel for those "in bonds as bound with them;" and to understand, that to save their own children, male and female, they must be willing to save the children of others. It will be observed, that I have said very little in regard to this class in the city of Boston; very little, also, that was definite in regard to our slop-shops. The deficiency is intentional. I would not have one woman feel that I had betrayed her confidence, nor one employer that I had singled him out as a victim; and it is almost impossible to speak on such subjects without finding the application made to one's hand. I may say, in general, that a very wide local experience sustains the arguments which I have based on published statistics.

It was also my earnest desire to prepare one article on this subject that might be put into the hands of both sexes; that might be opened to the young, and read in the family circle, without thrilling the reader with any emotion less sacred than religious pity. This cannot be true of the reports of any Moral Reform Society; for in them it is needful to print details so gross in character as to be fit reading for none but well-principled persons of mature age. It is not true of such a work as Dr. Sanger's; for his historical retrospect furnishes every possible excuse to the vices of youth, and is open to question on every page.

From the highest sources in this community—from the lips of distinguished clergymen, scholars, and men of the world—I have had every private assurance, that, in this respect, I have not failed.

It would be unjust not to state, that two powerful causes co-operate, in the city of Boston, with low wages, to cause the ruin of women; I mean the love of dress, and a morbid disgust at labor.

The love of dress was a motive which obviously had no natural relation to my subject. A disinclination to work, my readers may think, it was proper I should have treated; but it is the natural reflection of a state of things, in the upper classes, which would be a much fitter subject of rebuke.

So long as a lady will allow her guest to stand exposed to snow and rain, rather than turn the handle of the door which she happens to be passing; so long as neither bread nor water can be passed at table, except at the omnipresent waiter's convenience,—servants will naturally think that there is something degrading and repulsive in work. This reform must begin in the higher classes.

But, if this subject must be treated at all, why should it not be left to men? Can women deal with it abstractly and fairly? The answer is simple. In physics, no scientific observations are reliable, so long as they proceed from one quarter alone; many observers must report, and their observations must be compared, before we can have a trustworthy result. So it is in social science. Men have been dealing with this great evil, unassisted, for thousands of years. By their own confession, it is as unapproachable and obstinate as ever. Conquered by its perpetual re-appearance, they have come to treat it as an "institution" to be "managed;" not an evil to be abolished, or a blasphemy to be hushed. But these lectures are not written for atheists. The speculative sceptic has retreated before the broad sunlight of modern civilization: only two classes of atheists remain,—men of science, who fancy that they have lost sight of the Creator in his works, and talk of the human soul as the most noble result of material forces; and people of fashion, who live "without God in the world." Why man should ever investigate the material universe without a tender and reverent, nay, a growing dependence on "the dear heart of God," we will not pause to inquire. The child does not let go his father's hand when he first comprehends the abundance of his resources. Neither the fountains of God's beauty, nor the perplexities of his nicely ordered law, loosen man's loving grasp. He clings all the closer in his joy, because he knows Him better. But why should not the denizens of the fashionable world be atheists? When I go among them, and listen to their heartless fooleries; when I see them absorbed by the vain nothings of their coterie, rapt in endless consultations about times and seasons, devoid of any real enjoyment, hopeless of noble occupation, with the days all empty and the nights all dark,—then I, too, shiver with doubt, and am ready to say in my heart, "There is no God." We can never believe in any spiritual reality of which our own souls do not receive some faint reflex. These people must do the will of the Father, before they can believe in his love. I do not write for them, but for thoughtful men and women, who rejoice in God's presence, deny the permanence of evil institutions, and are anxious to share with others the inheritance that belongs to the "child of the kingdom,"—for those who have faith to remove mountains, and courage to confess the faith. For them I shall not have spoken too plainly.

Shortly after these essays were written,—in June, 1859,—I received from London Mrs. Jameson's "Letter to Lord John Russell;" and I cannot refrain from expressing the deep emotion with which I read what she had written to him upon the same subject. Well may she wear the silver hairs of her sixty years like a crown, if, only through their sanction, she may speak such noble words. But—

"Earnest purposes do age us fast;"

and many a true-hearted woman, far younger in years, would gladly bear witness with her.

I would not write, if I could, an "exhaustive" treatise. All I ask for my work is, that it should be "suggestive." With that purpose, I have worked out my schemes, in the last lecture, far enough to provoke objection, to stimulate the spirit of adventure, to show how easily the "work" may wait upon the "will." May the "Opening of the Gates" be near at hand!

It remains only to acknowledge my indebtedness to some English and American friends: and first to the "Englishwoman's Journal;" not merely for its own excellent articles, but for references and suggestions, most valuable when followed out. The story of the young straw-braider was drawn from its pages; and, disappointed in the arrival of original material from Paris, long expected, I have been compelled to depend upon it largely for my sketch of Félicie de Fauveau. To one of its editors, Miss B.R. Parkes, and to Madame Bodichon in London, as well as to the Rev. Mr. Higginson, I am under pleasant private obligations. I must rest content to seem largely indebted to the "Edinburgh Review," of April 1859, for condensing the results of the census. My materials were collected and arranged, when the article on "Female Industry" reached me; and the differences in treatment were so few, that I at once drew my pen through whatever was not sanctioned by its authority. The ladies who first directed my attention to the Waltham watch-factory, and to the inventors of artificial marble in France, will see from these few words that I am not forgetful.

Boston, November, 1859.

There seems, at first sight, a certain presumption in offering to an American public, at this moment, any book which does not treat of the great interests which convulse and perplex the United States. But experience has shown, that neither the individual nor the national mind can remain continually upon the rack; and both author and publisher have thought that a book upon a serious subject, popular in form and low in price, would find perhaps a more hearty welcome, under present circumstances, than in those prosperous days, when romances and poems, travels and biographies, were scattered over every table by the score.

"Woman's Right to Labor" owed its warm welcome, not to any power or skill in its author, but to the impatient interest of philanthropists in every thing relating to that subject. It remains to be seen, whether as large a portion of the public and the press are prepared to treat with candid consideration the subject of Law.

Both these volumes have been given to the world in their detached form, that they might receive the benefit of general criticism; that errors, inaccuracies, or misapprehensions, might be perceived and rectified before they took a permanent position as part of a larger work. All criticism, therefore, which is honestly intended, will be received with patience and gratitude; but a great deal falls to the lot of the author which cannot come under this head.

If we are told that a "wider acquaintance with the history" of a certain era will modify our views, it is natural to expect that an honest critic will show where the acquaintance fails, and how the views should be modified. When we are told that certain scientific illustrations, "though true in the main, are not accurate in detail," we may reasonably hope to see at least one error pointed out. When neither of these things is done, we sweep such remarks aside, as alike unprofitable to us and our readers.

A wide and generous sympathy in my aims has given me, thus far, all that I could desire of encouragement and appreciation; and this appreciation has come, in several instances, from a "household of faith" far removed from my own, and has been mingled in such cases with an outspoken regret, that one who "wrote so well, and felt so warmly," should not acknowledge on her pages the debt woman owes to Christianity, and unfurl an evangelical banner above a Christ-like work. Because such friends have spoken tenderly, I answer them respectfully; because I never saw any church-door so narrow that I could not pass through it, nor so wide that it would open to all God's glory, I answer them without fear.

And, first, I believe in God, as the tender Father of all; as one who cares for the least of his children, and does not turn from the greatest; as one whose eye marks the smallest inequalities of happiness or condition, and holds them in a memory which does not fail. I believe in Christ as his authorized Teacher, anointed to reveal the fulness of God's love through his own life of practical good-will. I do not expect him to be superseded or set aside; and I do expect, that in proportion as men grow wiser, humbler, and sweeter, their eyes will open only the more widely to the great miracle of his spotless life, to the heavenly nature of his so simple teachings. And, next, I believe in my own work,—the elevation of woman through education, which is development; through labor, which is salvation; through legal rights, which are only freedom to develop and save,—as part of the mission of Jesus on the earth, authorized by him, inspired of God, and sure of fulfilment as any portion of his law. If at any time I have lost sight of this in expression, it is because I have thought it impossible that the purpose and character of my work should be mistaken. I am a slow and patient worker,—patient, because one may well be patient, if God can; and therefore no disappointment, no lack of appreciation, could sour or disturb me.

If I have justified the publication of this essay at the present moment, it may be thought that I shall not be able to justify the principal presumption; namely, that of a woman who undertakes to write upon law.

Such a treatise as this would be valueless, in my eyes, if it were written by a man. It is a woman's judgment in matters that concern women that the world demands, before any radical change can be made. To understand the laws under which I must live, no recondite learning, no broad scholarship, no professional study, can be fitly required. Common intelligence and common sense are all that society has any right to claim of me. Because most women shrink from criticising this law, I have criticised it.

Very recently, the "London Quarterly" said, in speaking of the republication of John Austin's work, that "English jurisprudence would be indebted for one of its highest aids to the reverential affection of a wife, and the patient industry of a refined and intelligent woman;" and Mrs. Austin defends her undertaking on this very ground,—that, if she had not superintended the work, no one else would. If John Austin's firm and penetrating intellect could not hold a score of persons about his lecturer's desk, and if it found its fit appreciation only in the grave, a conscientious woman need not shrink from any branch of his great subject, only because her audience will be small.

In one of his lectures upon Art, John Ruskin says:—

"Every leaf we have seen, connects its work with the entire and accumulated result of the work of its predecessors. Dying, it leaves its own small but well-labored thread; adding, if imperceptibly, yet essentially, to the strength, from root to crest, of the trunk on which it has lived, and fitting that trunk for better service to the next year's foliage."

Let these words, printed on my titlepage, show the modesty of my aim, and the conscientious steadfastness of my purpose. As the leaf is to the tree, so is the individual to society. Tear away a single leaf from the towering crest, and the trunk does not seem to suffer: nevertheless, one small thread withers, one channel dries up, one source of beauty and use fails; and, from that moment, a certain sidewise tendency marks the growth.

To compact carefully one "well-labored thread," is all that I have sought to do,—to write a little book, that women might be won to read, as conscientiously as if it were a heavy tome, to be endlessly consulted by the bench.

In writing these three lectures, I feel quite sure that I must have made use of many significant expressions borrowed from those who have broken the way for me. For many years an extemporaneous lecturer on this and kindred topics, I have so wrought certain modes of expression into the fabric of my thought, that I do not know where to put my quotation-marks. To Mrs. Hugo Reed, for instance, I know I must be under great obligations; and I can only hope, that she will trust me with her thoughts and words as generously as I desire to trust all my readers with mine. It is little matter who does the work, so that it be done; but I owe to one author, in particular, something like an explanation.

A few days before the third of these lectures was delivered in Boston (that is, before Jan. 23, 1861), a gentleman from Paris brought me from Madame d'Héricourt a book called "La Femme Affranchie," an answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, and Comte, which its author kindly desired I should translate for the American market. Unable to comply with her request, some weeks elapsed before I opened the book. I was struck with the energy, self-possession, and rapidity with which she seized the various points of the subject, with the thoroughness of her assault, and the temper of her argument. I did not sympathize in all her methods or conclusions; but I was interested to observe, that, in what I had then written and publicly spoken of the relations between suffrage and humanity, I had, in several instances, used her very words, or she had used mine. I did not alter my manuscript; but, with better times, we may hope for a translation of her spirited volumes, and the public will then do justice to her precedence.

I have been anxious to have positive proof of my conjecture in regard to the authorship of the "Lawe's Resolution of the Rights of Women;" but persevering endeavors in England, in several directions, have only left the matter as it stands in the text. It would be very interesting to know something of the private history of the man who wrote that book.

In the first of the following lectures, I have ventured a rhetorical allusion to the blue-laws of Connecticut. Since it went to press, I have seen it stated, on high authority, that any American writer who should "profess to believe in the existence of the blue-laws of New Haven would simply proclaim himself a dunce;" and the "Saturday Review" has been handled without gloves for taking this existence for granted.

I never supposed that the term "blue" applied to the color of the paper on which such laws were printed, any more than I supposed "blue Presbyterianism" referred to the color of the presbyters' gowns. I supposed it was the outgrowth of a popular sarcasm, descriptive, not of a "veritable code," nor of a "practical code unpublished," but of such portions of the general code as were repugnant to common sense, and the genial nature of man. This I still think will be found to be the case; and it is certainly to Connecticut divines and Connecticut newspapers that we owe the popular impression.

It was in the forty-sixth year of the independence of the United States that S. Andrus & Co., of Hartford, published a volume purporting to be a compendium of early judicial proceedings in Connecticut, and especially of that portion of the proceedings of the Colony of New Haven commonly called the "blue-laws." Charles A. Ingersoll, Esq., testified to the correctness of these copies of the ancient record.

As I quote this title wholly from memory, I am unable to say whether the colony ever fined a bishop for kissing his own wife on Sunday; but I have read more than once of such fines; and, if no laws remain unrepealed on the Connecticut statute-book quite as absurd in their spirit and general tendency, there are many on those of Massachusetts and New Hampshire: so I shall let my rhetorical flourish stand.

To my English friends, to Mr. Herndon of Illinois, Mr. Higginson, and Samuel F. Haven, Esq., of Worcester, I owe my usual acknowledgments for books lent, and service proffered, with a generosity and graceful readiness cheering to remember.

Nor will I omit, in what may be a last opportunity, to bear faithful testimony to the assistance rendered, in all my studies of this sort, by my friend, Mr. John Patton, of Montreal. No single person has helped me so much, so wisely, or so well.

In order to secure technical accuracy, my manuscript and proofs have been subjected to the revision of my friend, the Hon. Samuel E. Sewall. The principal alteration which Mr. Sewall has made, has been the substitution of the word "suffrage" for that of "franchise;" which latter I used in the Continental fashion. I prefer it to "suffrage," because it seems to have a broader signification; but I yield it to his suggestion.

I would gladly have dedicated this volume to the memory of the late John W. Browne, whose pure purpose and eminent gifts made me rejoice, while he was living, to call him friend. As, however, he never read the whole of the manuscript, I have given it a dedication "to the friends of forsaken women," which no one, who knew him well, will fail to perceive includes him.

Boston, Sept. 1, 1861.

Caroline H. Dall

70, Warren Avenue,
Boston, January, 1867.

CONTENTS.

THE COLLEGE.

I.
THE CHRISTIAN DEMAND AND THE PUBLIC OPINION.

Original Proposition. Objections to Republicanism. No Retrograde Steps Possible. The Educational Rights of Women. A Share of Opportunities the only Effectual Way. Both Sexes need the Oversight of Women. Men need the Needle. Sydney Smith to Lady Holland. The Education not Won till its Privileges are attained. Kapnist and the Normal School. Low Wages. An Illustration. The Social Position of the Teacher. The Spirit of Caste. Increase of Salaries. Is it Real or Nominal? What is the Standard of Education? Niebuhr to Madame Hensler. Cousin and Madame de Sablé. Examples of To-day do not Cheer. Opinion of the Druses. Charles Lamb on Letitia Landon. Coventry Patmore. Mrs. Jameson on the English Deficiency. Standard of Italy. 500,000 Women in England. Dr. Gooch's Appeal. Opposition to first School of Design. Note on Miss Garrett. B.L. Bodichon on Jessie Meriton White and Medical Colleges. Need of a Medical Society. John Adams on his Wife. Why has not the Standard advanced? Alice Holliday in Egypt. Hekekyan Effendi speaking for the Massachusetts Board of Education. Madame Luce in Algiers. Her Workshop Discontinued. The Advance shown in such Lives. Mrs. Griffith. Janet Taylor. Miss Martineau. "Aurora Leigh." Maria Mitchell. Oread Institute. New-York Schools. Vassar College. Michigan University. Duty of Literary Men and Women to invigorate Public Opinion. What is Public Opinion? Mary Patton.
[pp. 1-48.]

II.
HOW PUBLIC OPINION IS MADE.

Existing Opinion. Proverbs. The Novel kept Faith with the Classics. Social Customs. Newspapers. All form this Opinion. Individual Influence must stem the United Current. The Classics. Aristophanes. Iscomachus. Euripides. College Slang. St. John. Margaret Fuller on her "Beloved Greeks." Buckle. From Greece to Rome. Ovid. No Need to end Classical Study. Rather sanctify it. Perversions of History in the Classical Spirit. Hypatia. Aspasia. Society in the Time of Louis XIV. and Charles II. Lady Morgan on Alfred de Vigny. Rousseau. Dr. Day, Dr. Gregory, and Dr. Fordyce. Margaret Fuller. Association of Ideas. Fanny Wright. Captain Wallis and the Queen of Otaheite. Peru and the Formosa Isles. African Customs. Mrs. Kirkland on the Strong Box. Sir John Bowring on Marriage. Mrs. Barbauld. The Newspapers. Impure Habits.
[pp. 49-82.]

III.
THE MEANING OF THE LIVES THAT HAVE MODIFIED PUBLIC OPINION.

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Literature of the Eighteenth Century. "Rights of Woman." "Not Empire, but Equality." Dr. Channing on Mrs. Wollstonecraft. Her Unhappy Home. Fanny Blood. Breaks up her School. Saves the French Crew. Provides for her Brothers and Sisters. Translations. Answer to Burke. Fuseli. Paris. Imlay. Helen Maria Williams. Happiness. Deserted in Eighteen Months. Attempted Suicide. Goes to Norway. Final Separation. Marries Godwin. Birth of Mrs. Shelley. Death of Mary. Her Husband's Testimony. No Fair Statement recorded. Strength of Prejudice against her. A Republican and a Unitarian. The Judgment of her own Time upon her. The Right of Society to pass Judgment. Mr. Day and Maria Edgeworth. Lady Morgan. Always True to Freedom. Harriet Martineau. Thorough Work. Mrs. Jameson. Her Bravery and Truth. Woman's Rights Testimony. Mrs. Gaskell. Fredrika Bremer. The Brownings. "Aurora Leigh." Charlotte Bronté. "I Care for Myself." Our Abdiel. Margaret Fuller as a Person. "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." "Truth-teller and Truth-compeller." Rebuke to Harriet Martineau. Emerson's Misapprehension. Florence Nightingale. Santa Paula. Mary Patton. Miss Muloch libels Women. The Popular Idea of Love. Woman's Entire Self-possession. Carlyle and Count Zinzendorf. Who refuses Strength must miss Beauty. The Best Brains make the Best Housekeepers. The Affections of the Woman prompt and dignify the Labors of the Scholar.
[pp. 83-130.]

THE MARKET.

I.
DEATH OR DISHONOR.

The Attar of Cashmere. Moral Force must change the Results of History. Statement of Subject. Death or Dishonor the Practical Question. An Honorable Independence the Way of Safety. The Forcing Pump and Siphon. Women must Work for Pay. Success the Best Argument. Competition in Rural Districts. Duchâtelet. Miss Craig. "Edinburgh Review." Dressmakers and Sir James Clarke. Lace-makers. Manchester Mantle-maker. 7,850 Ruined Women in New York. Society Responsible for this Evil. Governesses. Mr. Mayhew to the "Morning Chronicle." The Minister's Daughter. The Power of a Divine Love. Noble Natures among the Fallen. The Glasgow Case. 1,680 Reformed French Women. The Straw-braider. Have Women Strength to Labor? Marie de Lamourous. The Young Laborer to be Protected by Social Influences. Women Hard Workers from the Beginning. China. Hindostan. Bombay Ghauts. Australia. Africa. Greece. Bertha of the Transjurane. Tyrolese Escort of Women. Germany. Montenegro. Holland. France. Widow Brulow. Nelly Giles. Ignacia Riso. Factory Labor in France. Sale of Wives at Derby and Dudley. Women in the Coal-mines. Pinmakers. Anna Gurney. Honduras. American Indians. Santa Cruz. Ohio and Pennsylvania. New York. Women of Lawrence. Ship "Grotto." Thomas Garratt concerning Sarah Ann Scofield. That all Men support all Women, an Absurd Fiction.
[pp. 131-177.]

II.
VERIFY YOUR CREDENTIALS.

Want of Employment lowers the Whole Moral Tone. Vigorous Women do not Ask what they shall Do. Idleness the Curse of Heaven. Organized Opposition on Man's Part. Mr. Bennett and the Watch-makers. Ribbon Looms at Coventry. The School at Marlborough House. Miss Spencer. Painting Crockery. Printing in America. Pennsylvania Medical Society, 1859. Want of Respect for Labor. Census of the United Kingdom. Agriculture. Mining. Fishing. Servants, &c. Reporters. Bright Festival. Metal Workers. Gillott's Pens. Jewelry. Screw-making. Button-making. Paper and Card Making. Engravers, Printers, &c., &c. The Lower Classes need the Brains of the Upper. Labor in the United States. Nantucket. Pennsylvania. Dr. Franklin's Sister-in-law. Mrs. Hillman. Mrs. Johnson. Martha B. Curtis. Ann Bent. Scientific Pursuits not Open. Clerks under Government. Census. Waltham Watch Factory. Dentists. School Committees. Postmistresses. Olive Rose. Semi-professions and Artists. Shoe-making in Lynn. Condition of the Poor dependent on the Action of the Rich. Happy Homes the Growth of Active Lives. The Pine and Ænemone. Emily Plater. "Verify your Credentials." Encouragement from Men; Faithfulness from Women. The Sorbonne. Madame Sirault. That Career fated which Woman may not share. Influence of the Sexes on each other. Baron Toermer and Félicie de Fauveau.
[pp. 178-220.]

III.
"THE OPENING OF THE GATES."

The Drowning of Daughters. Teachers of Elocution and the Languages. Inspectors. Physicians. Dr. Heidenreich. Wood Carving. Properzia dei Rossi. Swiss Work. Elizabetta Sirani. Engravers. Barbers. Candied Fruit for Christmas. Pickles. Fruit Sauces. Dishmops. Gymnastics. Female Assistants in Jails, Prisons, Workhouses, not to be had till Public Opinion honors Labor. Florence Nightingale an Example. Parish Ministers. Deaconesses. Marian of the Seven Dials. Reading Aloud to the Perishing Classes. St. Pancras. Mrs. Wightman. A Training School. A Public Laundry and Bleaching Ground. Ready-made Clothing. An Assistance to our Practical Charity. Knitting Factory. Ornamental Work to be Avoided. Occupation for the Young Ladies at the West End. Mrs. Ellen Woodlock and her Industrial Schools. She takes Eighty Paupers out of the Poorhouse. Mr. Buckle's Position to be Questioned. Mistaken Moral Effort a Harm to Society. Want of Connection between the Employer and the Employed. People who want "a Chance Lift." Defects in our Present Intelligence-Offices. A Labor Exchange. The Argument Restated. Will you tread out the Nettles? The Drosera. Purposes the Blossoms of the Human Heart.
[pp. 221-261.]

THE COURT.

I.
THE ORIENTAL ESTIMATE AND THE FRENCH LAW.

The Seat of the Law the Bosom of God? Of what Law? Legal Restrictions constantly Outgrown. The Laws which relate to Woman. Vishnu Sarma: the Hindoo Wife must use the Dialect of the Slave. Ancient Chinese Writer. Köhl on Turkish Husbands. Convent to lock up Ladies. The Island of Cœlebes. The Garrows in the North-east of India. The Muhar. Military Tribe of Nairs in Malabar. Later Proverbs; used by the Satirists. The Four Points to Consider. Discussion of Marriage and Divorce to be Deferred. The Public Opinion which has educated Woman, and her Approximation to it. Woman under Roman Law. Absence of well-tested Cotemporaneous Evidence. Theodora. French Law. Bonaparte's Opinion. The Estimate of a Double Character. Condition of the Peasant-woman. Need of Love in the Upper Classes. Business-freedom. George Sand. Rosa Bonheur, and the Claimants for Civil Rights. The Dotal founded on Roman Law; the Communal founded on German. Dotal Law rejected throughout Europe. Protection means Subordination. As a "Public Merchant," Woman becomes a French Citizen. Position contradictory: not allowed to rule the Household, which is called her Sphere. Civil Position. No Right of Promotion. Laws of Louisiana. Estimate of Woman under the "Code Napoléon:" tends to lower her Wages. List of Employments. The Needle-women of Paris.
[pp. 263-286.]

II.
THE ENGLISH COMMON LAW.

It contains All to which we have any Need to Object. Literature. "The Lawe's Resolution of Woman's Rights." Inquiries as to its Author. Probability points to Sir John Doderidge. The Law, for Single Women, of Inheritance. Offices Open. Right to Vote, and Lady Packington. Sheriff of Westmoreland. Lady Rous. Henry VIII. and Lady Anne Berkeley. As Constable, and Overseer of the Poor. Female Voter in Nova Scotia. Law relating to Seduction: its Profanity. The French Law, as summed up by Legouvé. Woman's Opinion of this Law. Objections. Laws concerning Married Women. Impossibility of Divorce, from Hopeless Insanity. Instances where Men have taken the Law into their own Hands. Impossibility of Woman's ever doing this. Marriage of a Minor. A Wife loses all her Rights. Satire in a London Court. Truth of this. Consequent Unwillingness of the Honest Poor to Marry, and of Single Women of Rank to relinquish Power. Freedwomen at the South. The Descendant of Morgan the Buccaneer. Need of Equity. May make a Will by Permission. Nutriment of Infants. The Law resists Maternal Influence, and denies Natural Authority. Word not binding. Gifts Illegal. Indictments in the Husband's Name. Divorces: only Three ever granted to Women. The Widow recovers her Clothes and Jewels, but need not bury her Husband. Christian on Suffrage. Moderate Correction. Property-laws. The Hon. Mrs. Norton. Hungarian Freedom. Right to Vote. Experience in America. Parisian Milliner. "Union is Robbery." The Heiress. Longevity of the Wife. Woman discouraged from Labor by the Influence of the Laws of Property. Sexual Legislation thoroughly Immoral. Man's Adultery even a more Serious Evil than Woman's, so far as State Morals and Interests are concerned. Canton Glarus. "Courts have never gone that Length." Debate on the New Divorce Bill. Man's Fidelity considered an Imbecility. The Compliments of the Law. The Husband's Vigilance. Duplicity the Natural Result of Slavery. The Right of Suffrage. Objections Answered. The Abstract Right and the Practical Question. Suffrage to be limited by Education, not Money nor Sex. The "Sad Sisterhood." Woman has never had a Representative. Her Suffrage would put an End to Three Classes of Laws. Harris vs. Butler. Delicate Matters to be Discussed. The Duke of York's Trial. John Stuart Mill's Opinion. Dedication of his Essay on Liberty. Women of Upsal. On Juries. Miss Shedden. Russell on Female Evidence. Fate of the "Bulwarks of the English Constitution." Power of Women not Disputed while it was dependent on Property. It should depend on Humanity. Louis XIV. and the Fish-women. Pauline Roland and Madame Moniot. Men borrow the Suffrages of Women. Saxon Witas. Abbess Hilda. Council at Benconceld. King Edgar's Charter. Abbesses in Parliament. Peeresses in Parliament. East-India Stockholders. Stockholders in Banks. Association for the Promotion of Social Science. Mrs. Mill's Article. Florence Nightingale's Evidence. Petition to Parliament, and its Signers. The New Divorce Bill. Buckle's Lecture. Canadian Changes. Inconsistencies. Canadian Women as Voters. Pitcairn's Island.
[pp. 287-341.]

III.
THE UNITED-STATES LAW, AND SOME THOUGHTS ON HUMAN RIGHTS.

Condition of Women in Republics. Helvetia. Kent on the Law's Estimate. "The Man's Notion." Property-laws, and Natural Obligations of Husband and Wife. The Law's Indulgence. Marriage and Divorce in the Different States. Variety of the Laws. "Cruelty." What have the Woman's-Rights Party done?—changed the Law in nineteen States. The Law of Illinois. Rhode Island on Property. Vermont. Connecticut. New Hampshire. Massachusetts, and what remains to be done. Maine. Ohio. Judge Graham's Decision. Mrs. Dorr's Claim. New-York Property-bill of 1860, and its Supplement. Relief to 5,000 Women. Mrs. Stanton before the Legislature. The Right of Suffrage in New Jersey. Wisconsin. Michigan. Ohio. Kansas. Connecticut. Kentucky in Reference to Suffrage. A Woman's Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Mrs. John Adams and Hannah Corbin understood its Worthlessness. Richard Henry Lee on a Woman's Security. "Woman's Rights,"—a Phrase we all Hate: identical with "Human Rights,"—a Phrase we all Honor. Reception of Woman in the Lyceum. Labor to be honored through Woman. Trade to become a Fine Art. Property-holders must have Political Power. Mr. Phillips on Suffrage. The Lowell Mill. Dr. Hunt's Protests. Mean Men. Woman's Duty to the State a Moral Duty. Woman's Right to Man as Counsellor and Friend. The Constitution of the Family. The Historical Development of the Question. Mary Astell in the Seventeenth Century. Mary Wollstonecraft in the Eighteenth, and the Customs of Australia. Responses to her Appeal. Margaret Fuller in the Nineteenth. The great Lawsuit in 1844. Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. National Association in 1850. Profane Inanity. Chinese Women. Does Power belong to Humanity or to Property? Mahomet, and the Right to Rule. Wendell Phillips and the Venetian Catechism.
[pp. 342-374.]

TEN YEARS.

Education.—Absence of Discussion Wise. American Association for the Promotion of Social Science. Lectures from the Lowell Institute. Ripley College. Howard University. Professor Baldwin at Berea. St. Lawrence University, N.Y. Lombard University, Ill. Oberlin. List of Colleges it has Organized. Lane Seminary. President Finney. Ladies' Library. Ladies' Hall. Miss Fanny Jackson. A Confession. Antioch. Way thither. Yellow Springs. The Glen. Matins. Necessities. Changes in Buildings, Books, &c. Missionary Work. The Professors. The Brigadier-General. Literary Societies. A Southern Refugee. Vassar College. Lawrence University, Kansas. Letter from Miss Chapin. A Professor Elected. Michigan University. Miss Nightingale's Training-School for Nurses, Liverpool. Schools in Calcutta. Deaconesses. Kaiserworth. Strasburg. Basle. St. Loup. Geneva. Faubourg St. Antoine. Passevant Hospital. Bishop Kerfoot's Schools.
[pp. 377-429.]

Medical Education.—New-York Medical Society. Medical Society in London. Hospital of the Maternity in Paris. Miss Garrett and Apothecaries' Hall. Dr. Zakrzewska and the Medical Society. Medical Lectures at Harvard. Women and the Cossacks. Women and the Algerines. Women in India. Cause of Cholera. Success of Female Physicians. Dr. Ross. A Medical College Needed. New-England Hospital.
[pp. 429-434.]

Pulpit.—Amélie von Braum. Mamsell Berg. Rev. Olympia Brown. Mrs. Jenkins. Mrs. Booth. Mrs. Timmins. Ann Rexford. Nancy Gove Cram. Abigail H. Roberts. Mrs. Hedges. The Church at Amsterdam, and its Deaconesses. Resolution at Syracuse. Delegates to Local Conferences. Mrs. Dall. Counsel to Women who desire to preach.
[pp. 434-447.]

Art Schools.—Lowell Institute. Cooper Institute. Miss Roundtree and Miss Curtis. Coloring Photographs. Mrs. Elizabeth Murray and the London Society of Female Artists.
[pp. 447-449.]

Labor.—Statistics of Eight-hour Movement. Factory Labor in England. Foreign Society for Employment of Women. Mending Schools. A Barber. Public Clerks. Fanny Paine. Musical Careers. Charlotte Hill. Williston Button-factory. Madam Clarke. A Capitalist. Mr. Thayer's Lodging-house for Girls. Young Women's Christian Association. Lodging-house in New York. Miss Hill's Ruskin Lodging-houses in London. Female Printers. A Notary Public.
[pp. 450-468.]

Law.—Married Women in New York. Right of an Ordained Woman to Marry in Massachusetts. School Committees. Richmond. Are a Woman's Clothes her own? State of Missouri. College. Where shall a Woman's Children go to Church? Francis Jackson's Will. Conference at Leipsic. Petition to enable Widows, Potter's County, Pa. Women as Bank Directors.
[pp. 468-472.]

Suffrage.—Kansas. Missouri in Congress. The Speaker of the House. Mercantile Library in Philadelphia. Voting in New Jersey. Mr. Parker at Perth Amboy. A Petition to Kentucky. Equal-Rights Association, Petitions, &c. George Thompson's Objections. John Stuart Mill and the Franchise. English Petition a Model. To be sustained by Able Men. Mrs. Bodichon's Pamphlets. Women Ejected. Austria. Swedish Reform Bill. Italian Law. The Hungarian Diet.
[pp. 472-486.]

Civil Progress.—Australia. Moravia. Dublin. Aisne. Bergères. Need of a Newspaper.
[pp. 486-488.]

Obituaries, &c.—Merian. Baring. Farnham. Lemonnier. Dr. Barry. Mrs. Severn Newton.
[pp. 488-491.]

The Ballot will secure All Things. A Glimpse of the Wide West. Vassar and Miss Lyman. Oberlin and Mrs. Dascomb. Dr. Glass. Female Lecturers. Business Capacity of Women. The Ice in Fox River, Ill. Cholera at Elgin. Quincy High School. Coloring Photographs at the Cooper Institute. Conclusion.
[pp. 491-499.]

THE COLLEGE;
OR,
WOMAN'S RELATION TO EDUCATION.
IN THREE LECTURES.

Now press the clarion on thy woman's lip,
(Love's holy kiss shall still keep consecrate,)
And breathe the fine, keen breath along the brass,
And blow all class-walls level as Jericho's
Past Jordan.... The world's old;
But the old world waits the hour to be renewed.
Aurora Leigh.

Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,—
Godlike erect, with native honor clad
In naked majesty,—seemed lords of all:
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,—
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure;
Whence true authority in men.
Milton.

THE COLLEGE.

I.

THE CHRISTIAN DEMAND AND THE PUBLIC OPINION.

"Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with the choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come,
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before."
Macdonald.

TO propose an essay on education requires no little courage; for the term has covered, with its broad mantle, every thing that is stupid, perverse, and oppressive in literature. We will not tax ourselves, however, to consider exact theories, or suggest formal dissertations. In these lectures, let us take all the liberties of conversation; pass, in brief review, a wide range of subjects; comment lightly, not thoroughly, upon them; and trust to quick sympathies and intelligent apprehension to follow out any really useful suggestions that may be made.

Some time since, we laid down this proposition: "A man's right to education—that is, to the education or drawing-out of all the faculties God has given him—involves the right to a choice of vocation; that is, to a choice of the end to which those faculties shall be trained. The choice of vocation involves the right and the duty of protecting that vocation; that is, the right of deciding how far it shall be taxed, in how many ways legislative action shall be allowed to control it; in one word, the right to the elective franchise."

This statement we made in the broadest way; applying it to the present condition of women, and intending to show, that, the moment society conceded the right to education, it conceded the whole question, unless this logic could be disputed.

Men of high standing have been found to question a position seemingly so impregnable, but only on the ground that republicanism is itself a failure, and that it is quite time that Massachusetts should insist upon a property qualification for voters.

In this State, so remarkable for its intelligence and mechanical skill,—a State which has sent regiment after regiment to the battle-field, armed by the college, rather than the court,—in this State, one somewhat eminent voice has been heard to whisper, that men have not this right to education; that the lower classes in this country are fatally injured by the advantages offered them; that they would be happier, more contented, and more useful, if left to take their chance, or compelled to pay for the reading and writing which their employers, in some kinds, might require.

We need not be sorry that these objections are so stated. They are a fair sample of all the objections that obtain against the legal emancipation of woman, an emancipation which Christ himself intended and prophesied,—speaking always of his kingdom as one in which no distinctions of sex should either be needed or recognized. Push any objector to the wall, and he will be compelled to shift his attitude. He says nothing more about women, but shields himself under the old autocratic pretension, that man, collectively taken, has no right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness; that republicanism itself is a failure.

Our hearts need not sink in view of this assertion, apparently sustained by a civil war that fixes the suspicious eyes of autocratic Europe in sullen suspense. A republic, whose foundations were laid in usurpation, could not expect to stand, till it had, with its own right arm, struck off its "feet of clay." It is not freedom which fails, but slavery.

The course of the world is not retrograde. Massachusetts will not call a convention to insist upon a property qualification for voters, neither will she close her schoolhouses, nor forswear her ancient faith. The time shall yet come when she shall free herself from reproach, and fulfil the prophetic promise of her republicanism, by generous endowment for her women, and the open recognition of their citizenship.

It is not our purpose, however, to dwell upon facilities of school education. More conservative speakers will plead, eloquently as we could wish, in that behalf; and suggestions on other topics need to be made.

We have already said, that the educational rights of women are simply those of all human beings,—namely, "the right to be taught all common branches of learning, a sufficient use of the needle, and any higher branches, for which they shall evince either taste or inclination; the right to have colleges, schools of law, theology, and medicine open to them; the right of access to all scientific and literary collections, to anatomical preparations, historical records, and rare manuscripts."

And we do not make this claim with any particular theory as to woman's powers or possibilities. She may be equal to man, or inferior to him. She may fail in rhetoric, and succeed in mathematics. She may be able to bear fewer hours of study. She may insist on more protracted labor. What we claim is, that no one knows, as yet, what women are, or what they can do,—least of all, those who have been wedded for years to that low standard of womanly achievement, which classical study tends to sustain. Because we do not know, because experiment is necessary, we claim that all educational institutions should be kept open for her; that she should be encouraged to avail herself of these, according to her own inclination; and that, so far as possible, she should pursue her studies, and test her powers, in company with man. We do not wish her to follow any dictation; not ours, nor another's. We ask for her a freedom she has never yet had. There is, between the sexes, a law of incessant, reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when he permits brothers and sisters to nestle about one hearth-stone. Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis. In educating the sexes together under fatherly and motherly supervision,[1] we avail ourselves of the highest example; and the result will be a simplicity, modesty, and purity of character, not so easy to attain when general abstinence from each other's society makes the occasions of re-union a period of harmful excitement. Out of it would come a quick perception of mutual proprieties, delicate attention to manly and womanly habits, refinement of feeling, grace of manner, and a thoroughly symmetrical development. If the objections which are urged against this—the divine fashion of training men and women to the duties of life—were well founded, they would have been felt long ago in those district schools, attended by both sexes, which are the pride of New England. The classes recently opened by the Lowell Institute, under the control of the Institute of Technology, are an effort in the right direction, for which we cannot be too grateful. Heretofore, every attempt to give advanced instruction to women has failed. Did a woman select the most accomplished instructor of men, and pay him the highest fee, she could not secure thorough tuition. He taught her without conscience in the higher branches; for he took it upon himself to assume that she would never put them to practical use. He treated her desire for such instruction as a caprice, though she might have shown her appreciation by the distinct bias of her life. We claim for women a share of the opportunities offered to men, because we believe that they will never be thoroughly taught until they are taught at the same time and in the same classes.

The most mischievous errors are perpetuated by drawing masculine and feminine lines in theory at the outset. The God-given impulse of sex, if left in complete freedom, will establish, in time, certain distinctions for itself; but these distinctions should never be pressed on any individual soul. Whether man or woman, each should be left free to choose its own methods of development. We pause, therefore, to show, that, when we spoke of a certain use of the needle as a matter to be taught to both sexes, we did so by no inadvertence. The use of the sewing machine is even now common to both; but men, as well as women, should be taught to use their fingers for common purposes skilfully. Personal contact with the pauperism of large cities has sent this conviction home to many practical minds.

The rough tippets, mittens, and socks imported into the British Colonies, are the work of the Welsh farmers and the Shetland fishermen during the long tempestuous winter nights. In writing to Lady Holland, Sidney Smith pens some pleasant words on this subject.

"I wish I could sew," he says. "I believe one reason why women are so much more cheerful than men is because they can work, and so vary their employments. Lady —— used to teach her boys carpet-work. All men ought to learn to sew."

All men! and so might the cares of many women be lightened. Let us candidly confess our own indebtedness to the needle. How many hours of sorrow has it softened, how many bitter irritations calmed, how many confused thoughts reduced to order, how many life-plans sketched in purple!

Let us pass over that portion of our statement which hints at vocation, and confine ourselves, for the present, to that part of it which looks to an unrestricted mental culture. Nowhere is this systematically denied to women. It is quite common to hear people say, "There is no need to press that subject. Education in New England is free to women. In Bangor, Portsmouth, Newburyport, and Boston, they are better Latin scholars than the men. Nothing can set this stream back: turn and labor elsewhere."

We have shown to how very small an extent this statement is true. If it were true of the mere means of education, education itself is not won for woman, till it brings to her precisely the same blessings that it bears to the feet of man; till it gives her honor, respect, and bread; till position becomes the rightful inheritance of capacity, and social influence follows a knowledge of mathematics and the languages. Our deficiency in the last stages of the culture offered to our women made a strong impression on a late Russian traveller.

"Is that the best you can do?" said Mr. Kapnist, when he came out of the Mason-street Normal School for Girls. "It is very poor. In Russia, we should do better. At Cambridge, you have eminent men in every kind,—Agassiz, Gray, Peirce. Why do they not lecture to these women? In Russia, they would go everywhere,—speak to both sexes. At a certain age, recitation is the very poorest way of imparting knowledge."

To all adult minds, lectures convey instruction more happily than recitation; and, when men and women are taught together, the lecture system is valuable, because it permits the mind to appropriate its own nutriment, and does not oppress the faculties with uncongenial food.

To those who are familiar with the whole question, no theme is more painful than that of the inadequate compensation and depressed position of the female teacher. There is no need to harp on this discordant string. Let us strike its key-note in a single story.

A year ago, in one of the most beautiful towns of this neighborhood, separated by a grassy common, shaded with drooping elms, rose two ample buildings, dedicated to the same purpose. They were the High Schools for the two sexes.

They were taught by two persons, admirably fitted for their work. The man, uncommonly happy in imparting instruction, was yet deficient in mathematics, and considered by competent judges inferior to the woman.

She was an orphan, with a young sister dependent upon her for instruction and support. She had been graduated with the highest honors at one of the State Normal Schools. She was delicate and beautiful; not in the least "strong-minded." Neither spectacles upon her nose, nor wooden soles to her boots, appealed to the popular indignation. All who knew her loved her; and the man whom we have named was not ashamed to receive instruction from her in geometry and algebra. The two schools were equal in numbers. The man was a bachelor, subject to no claim beyond his own necessity. What did common sense and right reason demand, but that these two persons should be treated alike by society, prudential committees, and so on? You shall hear what was the fact. The man was engaged at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. The wealthiest class in the community intrusted its sons to his charge without question. Single, he was made much of in society, invited to parties, and had his own corner at many a tea-table, which he brightened with his pleasant jokes. He soon came to be a person in the town,—had his vote, was valued accordingly; went to church, was put upon committees, had a great deal to do with calling the new minister, and so, out of school, had pleasant and varied occupation, which saved his soul from racking to death over the ruts of the Latin grammar. Would we have it otherwise? Was it not all right? Certainly it was, and our friend deserved it; deserved, too, that when the second year was half over, and there were rumors that a distant city had secured his services, the committee should raise his salary two hundred and fifty dollars, and so keep him for themselves. But let us look at the reverse of the picture. The woman, burdened with the care of a younger sister, greatly this man's superior in mathematics and possibly in other things, was engaged at six hundred dollars. It was not customary for the wealthy families in that neighborhood to trust their girls to the tender mercies of a public school; so she had a class of pupils less elegant in manner, of more ordinary mental training, and every way more difficult to control. Still they were disciplined, and learned to love their teacher. A few of the parents called upon her, and she was occasionally invited to their homes. But these homes were not congenial to her tastes or habits. There was no intellectual stimulus derived from them to brighten her life. They offered neither pictures, statues, books, nor the results of travel, to her delicate and yearning appreciation. She talked, for the most part, of her pupils and their work; and the strain of her vocation, always heavier on woman than on man, wore more and more upon her soul. Society, as such, offered her no welcome.[2]

She was nothing to the town. She hired her seat, and went to church. She had no vote, was never on a parish committee, had only one chance to change her position. That was to remove to a more congenial neighborhood, at a lower salary; but she thought of her young sister, and refused. If the committee heard of it, they did not offer to increase her salary. They were men incapable of appreciating her rare and modest culture. There was a tendency to consumption in her frame. Had she been happy, she might have resisted it for years, perhaps for ever; but with the restless pining at her heart, that mental and moral marasmus, the physical disease soon showed itself. In the commencement of the third year of her teaching, she began to cough; and, in less than three months from the day when she heard her last class, she lay in an early but not unhonored grave. The deep affection of her classmates in the Normal School had always followed her; and one who chanced to hear of her illness brightened its rapid decline. This woman, herself prematurely old, in consequence of twelve years of labor on the Red River of Louisiana, the only place open to her, where her abilities were appreciated to the extent of twelve hundred dollars a year, and would enable her to support a widowed mother,—this woman, with her now-scanty purse, supplied the invalid with fresh flowers and sweet pictures; and, when her heavy eye grew weary of gazing, gently closed it in the sleep of death, scattered rare and fragrant blossoms over her unconscious form, and followed it to the grave. Those flowers! brought daily to her teacher's-desk by a friendly or loving hand, they might have fed a craving heart, and saved a precious life.

It is no new story. You have heard it many times. Do not reply in the stale maxims of political economy. Do not say that woman's labor is cheaper than man's, because it is more abundant. Unskilled labor, we will grant you, is more abundant; but such labor as is here offered must always be rare and valuable. To the applicants who came to fill her vacant place the committee said, "We do not expect to find another capable as she was. We have only to select one that will do." Yet they had not been ashamed to use that capacity without paying for it! Only ignorance and prejudice and custom stood in the way of its appreciation; only the want of that respect which a citizen can always command was at the bottom of her social isolation. She never complained; but we complain for her, sadly conscious, that, until men themselves perceive what is fit, the remonstrances of women will be fruitless. One such word as that spoken by the Hon. Joseph White at Framingham, in July, 1864, is worth more than all that women can say. Nevertheless, we women have our duty. It is to convince and stimulate men. Be on the watch, then, for such women; and claim for them their place and remuneration. Help society to understand its duty, to be frank and honorable. And if certain services are worth, as in this case, seventeen hundred and fifty dollars a year, pay for equal services, by whomsoever rendered, an equal sum.

Since I first began to speak upon this subject, a very great change has taken place: women are put in places which require higher culture and greater administrative capacity. They are also paid better wages: these wages are not yet in fair proportion to what are paid to men for the same work; and the shameful argument is still used, that we employ women, chiefly because men will not work for the same price. The Roxbury High School, the Shurtleff Grammar School in Chelsea, the Normal School at St. Louis, and the Normal School at Framingham, are now under the charge of women. In the list of teachers from the Oswego School, we find four who are paid one thousand dollars a year, and eleven who are paid seven hundred dollars. Our daily press is very well satisfied with this; but, since 1860, what portion of a decent living will seven hundred dollars provide to a cultivated woman? When the salaries of the St. Louis teachers were raised in 1866, the principal was obliged to express her indignation before her salary was raised to its present sum of two thousand dollars. Had she been a man, she would certainly have had as much as the principal of the High School; namely, twenty-seven hundred and fifty dollars. A graduate of Antioch College, assisting in the High School at St. Louis, has twelve hundred dollars, where a man would have seventeen hundred dollars. Miss Brackett's own assistants in the Normal School have eleven hundred dollars.

The appointment of Miss Johnson to the head of the Normal School at Framingham will open the way to a similar change in many quarters, if what Governor Bullock has not disdained to call the "policy of Massachusetts" is consistently carried out. I do not know what salary is offered to Miss Johnson; but, if it were equal to that of the man who preceded her, would not the newspapers have told us? The comparative value of these salaries is not shown by the figures. It depends on the prices of gold, and of food and provisions, each year. It cannot be half as great as an inexperienced person would think.

There is a great want of female teachers of Latin and French. School committees assure me, that proficients in language would be certain of good pay in our high schools. For the most part, women prefer to devote themselves to mathematics. I used to say, with a smile, in the Western States, that all the women could read the "Mécanique Céleste;" but they found Cæsar and Télémaque equally uninteresting. Later, Colonel Higginson bears witness to the impossibility of getting good classical teachers.

It is a common idea, that the standard of education is higher now than it was thirty years ago. It may be doubted. More things are taught in schools,—ologies, isms, and the like; but the most thorough teachers are not the most popular, and it may be questioned, whether in the best minds on the Continent, in England, or this country, so great progress has been made as has been generally claimed. There is much more liberality in regard to the general question, but no more in regard to the ideal standard.

In one of Niebuhr's letters to Madame Hensler, he says, in speaking of Klopstock: "The character of the women is a remarkable feature of the time of Klopstock's youth. The cultivation of the mind was carried incomparably farther with them than with nearly all the young women of our days; and this we should scarcely have expected to find in the cotemporaries of our grandmothers. It was not, therefore, the influence of our native literature; for that first rose into being along with, and under the influence of, the love inspired by these charming maidens. For some time after the Thirty Years' War, the ladies of Germany, particularly those of the middle classes, were excessively coarse and uneducated. This wonderful alteration must have taken place, therefore, during eighty years,—between 1660 and 1740; though we are quite ignorant how and when it began."

Passing over to France, we encounter the reputation of Madame de Sablé; a woman, let me remark, for the benefit of those who are afraid that the march of education will deprive them of their dinners, as celebrated for her exquisite cooking and delicate confections as she was for her literary ability. In speaking of her, Cousin says: "All the literature of maxims and thoughts, including those of La Rochefoucauld, grew up in the salon of a lovely woman withdrawn into a convent. Having no earthly pleasure but that of reliving her life, she knew how to impart her own taste to society, in which she met by chance an accomplished wit, whom she contrived to turn into a great writer." He is speaking of the early part of the seventeenth century; and, in spite of the notorious dissipation of the period, many gifted and many virtuous women crowded her salon,—the Princess Palatine, the Princesses of Condé, de Conti, de Longueville, and Schomberg, Anna de Rohan, and Mademoiselle herself. There the gentlemen carried the pages they wrote at home, and not only bore with, but accepted, the criticisms of the women. They had no compensation but their praises, unless, like La Rochefoucauld, they were cunning enough to demand a carrot pottage or some preserved plums in exchange for a page of literature. In England, it is not necessary to avail ourselves of an exceptional education, like that of Lady Jane Grey. Remembering the noble culture of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, of the sturdy women of the Commonwealth, we might surely expect a greater progress in the national idea. But, if its average could be found, neither the wife of John Hampden nor Lady Russell would accept it. It would seem that our standard advances, if at all, by a series of Hugh Miller's parabolic curves. What we find, depends upon the point at which we happen to test the eccentric arc; and, when we enter the nineteenth century, we are forced to take refuge in analogy, and ask, "If the ancient Egyptians ever mastered the Copernican idea, why should Galileo be imprisoned to-day for insisting that the sun does not move round the earth?" The stimulating examples of noble and educated women, which now present themselves, do not cheer us as they should, while they remain exceptions. In making what Dickens would call an "indiscriminate and incontinent" excursion, into the regions of female thought and literature, we find its atmosphere in a somewhat unventilated condition, and are reminded of an opinion of the Druses which does not seem to have been wholly impertinent, that "literature is a mean and contemptible occupation, fit only for women." Twenty years ago, when ties of an almost filial tenderness linked us to the household of the late Judge Cranch, we have often followed him, unrecognized, of a Saturday afternoon, when, returning from the bench, he climbed Capitol Hill, one hand grasping the handle of some colored washerwoman's basket, or slinging her heavy bundle over his shoulder on a stick. The dear remembrance, sustained by all the sweet and delicate courtesies of his private life, has always lain side by side in our mind with that exquisite Essay of Elia to which he first directed our attention, in which a noble reverence to woman is inculcated, and we are taught to judge every man's respect for the sex by his demeanor towards its humblest representative. Yet, if Judge Cranch never swerved from his gracious dignity, Charles Lamb did. Woman had not gained, in his lifetime, such a hold upon her intellectual rights, that a dinner company dared chide him, when he said of Letitia Landon, "If she belonged to me, I would lock her up, and feed her on bread and water, till she gave up writing poetry. A female poet, or female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think."

We do not quote these words so much against Lamb himself,—for the lips of Mary Lamb's brother must have been thick with wine, when, with "stammering, insufficient sound," he included her in so sweeping a reprobation,—but to indicate the nature of that public opinion which is even now dwarfing the ideals of the best men; to show how little reliance is to be placed on the standard of the most generous, when a remark like this, uttered in a large literary circle, passes without criticism, and is recorded without conscious mortification,—recorded, too, by the father of that Coventry Patmore, who has known how to offer us, in later times, sugar-plums of his own coloring—let us add of his own poisoning also—under the alluring names of "betrothals" and "espousals." How far the facts are from the ideal standard, Mrs. Jameson, in a lecture lately delivered, will help us to show.

"With all our schools," she says, "of all denominations, it remains an astounding fact, that one-half of the women who annually become wives, in this England of ours, cannot sign their names in the parish register; and that this amount of ignorance in the lower classes is accompanied with an amount of ill-health, despondency, inaptitude, and uselessness in the so-called educated classes, which, taken together, prove that our boasted appliances are to a great extent failures."

The ancient standard of Italy was very high, even in the fifteenth century, if we consider only the literary skill or mathematical culture frequently desired and attained; but Anna Maria Mozzoni may congratulate herself on having given a moral and social impetus to it, which it has never before received. Her wise, considerate, philosophical suggestions will meet the cordial welcome of all right-minded women. If followed out, they will create nobler women than Tambroni or Laura Veratti.[3]

There was no institution in England for the proper training of sick nurses, when Florence Nightingale went to Kaiserworth, a small town near Düsseldorf, on the Rhine, to prepare herself to take charge of the Female Sanitorium. In Great Britain, at this moment, the excess of the female population over the male amounts to five hundred thousand souls; and from all directions we hear the cry, that men need educated assistants. What is the country doing to answer this cry, to educate her five hundred thousand women? In 1825 Dr. Gooch made a noble appeal to the English public, in behalf of educating women to be nurses; but there was no response. When the first school of design was started, a petition was drawn up and signed, praying that women might not be taught, at the expense of the Government, arts which would interfere with the employment of men, and "take the bread out of their mouths"!

Here was an absurd interference with the right of feeding, on the part of these petitioners! As if women did not want bread as well as men; and being, according to authority, the less intelligent and weaker sex, one would suppose that to help them to find it might be a part of that protection to which the Government stands pledged, and for which their property is taxed.

"But," says Mrs. Jameson, "if a petition were drawn up, and handed to medical men, praying that women should not be trained as nurses, nor taught the laws of health, I am afraid there are well-intentioned men, who would, at the time, be induced to sign it; but I believe that twenty, nay, even ten years hence, they would look back upon their signatures with as much disgust and amazement as is now excited by the attempt to explode and sneer down the school at Marlborough House."

Another noble English woman, Mrs. Barbara Leigh Bodichon, in a recent pamphlet called "Woman and Work," gives us the correspondence between Jessie Meriton White and the various medical schools to which she applied for admission. This lady had for several years had charge of two little lame children, one of them her own nephew. The latter, on account of some structural defect, had broken his leg sixteen times. Once, when suitable attendance was not to be had, his aunt set and splintered it herself. The physician who examined it advised her to apply for instruction. She applied to fourteen medical institutions in the city of London, asking sometimes for private anatomical instruction. The correspondence with four colleges in the year 1856 is given,—from the St. George's, the Royal College of Surgeons, St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and the University of London. It amply bears out her assertion, that she was nowhere met with solid objections, or with sensible and logical replies. Sometimes she was told of the indelicacy of her request! The University of London, which was legally bound by its charter to receive her, treated her as coolly as the rest; and in no case was any individual regret expressed for the official decision.

Indelicacy, forsooth! Where can we find it, if not in the impure nature which raises the objection, and the low manner of thinking in general society which consents to receive it? May not the mother, who receives her naked new-born child from the hand of God, fitly ask to understand the liabilities of its little frame? May not the wife, called in seasons of sickness to the most delicate and trying duties, modestly ask for that thorough culture which alone can make those duties easy? And who make this objection? Men who go shuddering and half-drunken into the dissecting room, to scatter vile jests above that prostrate temple of the Holy Ghost! Men who see nothing in the exquisite development of God's creation, but the reflection of their own obscene lives! Students who know no better way to steel their courage to the use of the scalpel than to play at foot-ball on the college green with a human skull, holding its dignity to the level of their own honor![4]

The best hope that Jessie Meriton White has for England is, that some of the most distinguished professors shall consent in time to take classes of female students.

The office of the physician is as holy as that of the priest: formerly they were one; now, at least, the physician should be priest-like. Irreverence and impurity should be banished from medical ranks. The science of medicine stands in great need of the intuitive genius of woman. In pursuing it, she will need the steady caution of man. In this country and in France, earnest and devoted students of both sexes have stood in the dissecting room to the benefit of both. So let them continue to stand, till the spirit is known by its fruits. An impure man is no better than an impure woman; but impurity among men may be concealed. Let it come between the two sexes, and it will be brought at once into antagonism with society, and will meet its true desert. The objection reveals the secrets of the medical college, and is the strongest argument ever offered for the medical education of women.

If women are to practise as physicians, some means should be taken to protect society against those who are imperfectly educated. What a degree means will always be doubtful, until men and women receive their degrees in the same way and from the same hands. America stands greatly in need of this protection. Crowds of unauthorized, half-educated women, some of whom have not been ashamed to cross the Atlantic, and have attracted such sympathy abroad as only a different class of students deserve, are thronging the valley of the Mississippi, as well as haunting with their empirical pretensions the purlieus of the seaboard cities. If men had received properly trained women into their colleges and medical societies, this would not have happened. Cannot such physicians as Dr. Zakrzewska, Dr. Blackwell, Dr. Sewall, Dr. Tyng, and Dr. Ross of Milwaukie, unite to organize a Woman's Medical Society, with an examining board whose diploma shall attest the character of the member? Dr. Storer's admirable pamphlet entitled "Why not?" points out an evil, which will never be remedied by thrusting empirical women into the positions now held by unscrupulous men.[5]

And what have we to say of our own country? Has the American standard reached a safe altitude, or must we admit that it has the same limitations? A popular width of view we have certainly gained in the last half-century; but have we made secure progress in the right direction? Some eighty years ago, John Adams wrote of his wife, "This lady was more beautiful than Lady Russell, had a brighter genius, more information, and more refined taste, and was at least her equal in virtues of the heart, in fortitude and firmness of character, in resignation to the will of Heaven, and in all the virtues and graces of the Christian life. Like Lady Russell, she never discouraged her husband from running all hazards for the salvation of his country's liberties; she was willing to share with me, and that her children should share with us both, in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard."

Will America ever offer to the world a nobler picture? Is it at this moment above or below our average ideal? "With such a mother," said John Quincy Adams, in Boston, less than twenty years ago, "with such a mother, it has been the perpetual instruction of my life to love and reverence the female sex; but I have been taught also—and the lesson is still more deeply impressed—I have been taught not to flatter them." Noble words! Gentlemen to whom it falls to deliver annually Normal-school addresses would do well to take a lesson from them. They would wince a little, could they hear the criticisms of the indignant girls upon their actual advice and praise. How would these men have liked it, if at fifteen they had been addressed as fathers of an unborn generation, whose especial duty it was to adapt themselves to this sphere? And why should men complain, that women look to marriage, and marriage only, as salvation, if the whole tenor of their own influence is used to emphasize it as woman's "manifest destiny"? "Are there not two married, and where is the one?" What propriety is there in assuming, in advance, that the sphere which married life opens has a stronger hold on one sex than the other?

We have said enough to show, that in Germany, France, England, and America, the ideal standard of education was sufficiently high over a century ago. Why has not such actual progress been made as might have been expected?

Because public opinion has constantly thwarted the ideal growth. Educated women have, for the most part, wanted courage to do what is right, unless sustained by men. In education, for the duties of which they are acknowledged to be superior, they have never insisted on the changes they knew to be necessary, but have uniformly succumbed to the masculine idea. Shall we blame them? Is a conflict in the heart of a family a pleasant thing? Certainly, the hand which the magnanimous sympathy of men has set free cannot cast the first stone. The slowness and faithlessness of men too often paralyzes the best efforts of women. The faith which Isabella showed Columbus, would be, at this moment, a grateful return from them. Charles Lamb has shown us how valueless to the working woman the support of delicate sentiment may be. The ringing of the glasses round a table dulled his exquisite ear to the fine spheral harmonies it had once caught. He broke, in an after-dinner tilt, the very lance with which he had pierced to the heart of the enemy's shield. If the ideal standard makes no headway against public opinion, what encouragement to our hopes does common life offer?

As exquisite beauty of water, hill, and dale lies hidden in many a country hamlet, unheeded by the guidebook, unsuspected by the traveller on the turnpike road; so, in society, self-sacrifice, noble daring, and saintly perseverance, nestle behind the prominent failure. We find them everywhere, except where we should most naturally look for them.

There is in England a Society for the Promotion of Female Education in the East. It undertakes to do abroad precisely the work that its individual members refuse to assist the community to do at home. Consequently, their printed schemes read like satires on their individual convictions. In the year 1835, Miss Alice Holliday called the attention of this society to the condition of women in Egypt and Abyssinia. She asked their sanction to her attempt to educate the women of Egypt, with an ultimate view to those of Abyssinia, whose condition chiefly interested her. She had pursued a severe course of study, unfriended and alone, before she asked this help. She had studied the severe sciences, the antiquities and customs of the countries themselves, and the Arabic and Coptic languages. She was fortunate also in stirring the enthusiasm of a certain Miss Rogers, who, unable to teach, was yet willing to accompany her friend, and devote her fortune to their mutual support. As these ladies wanted no money from the society they consulted, they were received as agents without difficulty, and reached Alexandria in the autumn of 1836. At this time Miss Holliday wrote: "The condition of the Coptic women is truly lamentable. Their abodes are like the filthiest holes in London; yet their persons are decked out in the most costly apparel. I have seen ladies sitting at their latticed windows, their heads and necks adorned with pearls and diamonds of the highest value, their bodies covered with the richest silks and velvets, while the room they occupied was the most disgusting scene you can imagine. Smoking and sleeping occupy their time. Female schools have never had an existence, and the prejudice against them is very strong."

We can recall the argument used in those Eastern lands, and the answer which civilization offered. "I am afraid to teach my women," said the Turk: "they are already crafty and impure. To gather them into public places is to offer a premium on immodesty, and a temptation to misconduct." The Christian answered proudly, "We can trust our women; yes, even in Paris and London."

Soon after their arrival, Miss Rogers died; but her friend was not discouraged. In the following March, an officer of state, Hekekyan Effendi, came to inquire whether she would take charge of the royal women, one hundred in number, and the nearest relatives of the sovereign. Much depended, it was thought, upon the co-operation of the oldest daughter, Nas-lee Hanoom; and it was His Highness's desire that the heads of the family should be formed into a committee to extend female schools. See how this Mohammedan officer writes to Miss Holliday.

"You have no doubt read much about hareems," he says, "yet little, I fear, that resembles the truth. We pay great respect to women and aged persons, whatever may be our own rank. Our children, however, are uneducated, in the European sense of the term. Besides being illiterate, they know nothing of domestic economy; and, in the middling and lower classes of the community, this ignorance is so profound as to endanger, by its dire consequences, domestic health, peace, and prosperity. This want is the first cause of slavery and its concomitant vices. In seconding the illustrious efforts of Mehemet Ali, I have been able to trace our debasement as a nation to no other cause than the want of a useful and efficient moral education for our women. In giving to them enlightened education, we shall be striking at the root of the evils that afflict us; we shall diminish the dangers and misfortunes which proceed from ignorance and idleness. Habits of industry, cleanliness, order, and economy, by increasing happiness, make us morally better, and will secure that moral training to our children which no subsequent effort is sufficient to replace."

So true is it that the value of words is comparative, that all this might have been written by some Secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts. The arguments of the Turk and Effendi are very familiar to us. Modern civilized society shuts women out of schools to protect their modesty. Modern professors tell us how much they respect women, and value material training, at the very moment when they bar the gates of life against her. On the 27th of March, 1838, Miss Holliday went in state to the hareem. She was preceded by the two janissaries attached to the English Consulate, bearing their silver wands of office, and accompanied by the wife of Hekekyan. In the ante-room they were regaled with coffee out of golden cups set with diamonds. Young Georgian girls of great beauty brought sherbet and massive pipes with amber mouth-pieces. They were then introduced to the Princess Nas-lee, a little woman about forty, simply dressed; and, before the interview ended, Alice had promised to spend four hours of every day in the hareem. She began with instruction that tended to civilize daily life; and boxes of embroidery and baby-clothes, made for patterns in England, excited the first lively interest. She declined all invitations to take up her abode in the hareem, although promised entire liberty. She was humble, and, as a consequence, wise. She did not expect great results, or look for much enthusiasm, in the hareem.

In August, she writes: "My visits have been attended with the most cheering success. I am received and honored with every possible distinction; but, added to my school, it is a great fatigue." Her character in every way sustained the effect of her teaching. She was offered thirty pounds a month for her attendance at the hareem, but thought ten pounds sufficient, and would accept no more. In October, a box of presents was received from England. When Hekekyan was invited to look into this box, he seized upon some scientific plates sent to the young princess. "Ah!" said he, "these are the things we need." The Pacha was captivated, in his turn, by an orrery, and a model of the Thames Tunnel. The hareem sent back a similar box, and Nas-lee herself worked a scarf for the queen. Miss Holliday was soon ordered to translate some of her books into Turkish; and her princesses wrote touching letters to their English friends. Soon after, we find this indefatigable woman teaching English, French, drawing, and writing, in the hareem of a late Governor of Cairo. Education must begin with languages; for Egypt has no literature to offer to her children. In 1840 Victoria sent to the hareem a portrait of herself, which was carried in procession and hung with proper honors by the side of that of the pacha. Very soon came an Egyptian Society for the Promotion of Female Education. Scientific instruments and books were ordered. An infant school began with one hundred and fifty children. The hareem demanded another teacher, and Mrs. Lieder was sent out. In 1844 a male school was formed, and European teachers imported. The young girls, who had begun with needle-work eight years before, were now studying Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, geography, arithmetic, and drawing. "What a change," writes Alice in 1846,—"what a change within the last ten years! When I came to Egypt, there was not a woman who could read; and now some hundreds have not only the power, but the best books. Year after year, I have been permitted to see the growth of a new civilization. What a change has come over the royal family since I first entered it! The desire for trifles is preparing the way for our noblest gifts; and a fatal blow has been struck at the whole system of hareems." It would be pleasant to trace this devoted woman farther, to know whether she still lives, and if she has reached the Abyssinian plains. In this humble way began the great educational movement in Egypt, which gave strength and vitality to Mehemet Ali's best-considered plans, which has sent scores of young princes to Paris, and will eventually change the face of the whole land.

Alice Holliday succeeded, because the "sinews of war"—namely, the "purse-strings"—were in her own hands. Very similar in spirit was the enterprise of Madame Luce in Algiers, of which Madame Bodichon has given an interesting account. Madame Luce went to Algiers, soon after the conquest, about 1834, and was probably a teacher in the family of one of the resident functionaries. In 1845, nearly nine years after Alice had begun her Egyptian labors, Madame Luce was a widow, with very little money to devote to the work on which she had set her heart; namely, a school to civilize the women of Algiers. Government was already beginning to instruct the men; but the Mohammedan dread of proselytism stood in their way. The women were in the worst state,—closely veiled, taught no manual arts, having no skill in housekeeping even,—for the simple life of a warm climate, the scanty furniture, give no scope for such skill. To wash their linen, to clamber over the roofs to make calls, to offer coffee and receive it, to dress very splendidly at times, very untidily always, was the synopsis of their lives. They did not know their own ages, yet were liable to be sold in marriage at the age of ten. Upon such material, and at such a time,—when the value of a Moorish woman was estimated, like that of a cow, by her weight,—Madame Luce undertook to work. She had a Christian courage in her heart, which might put many a man to shame.

While laying her plans, she had perfected herself in the native tongue, and now commenced a campaign among the families of her acquaintance, coaxing them to trust their little girls to her for three or four hours a day, that they might be taught to read and write French, and also to sew neatly. Her presents, her philanthropic tact, her solemn promise not to interfere in matters of religion, won for her, at length, four little girls, whom she took to her own hired house without a moment's delay. As the rumor of her success spread, one child after another dropped in, till she had more than thirty. Finding the experiment answer beyond her hopes, she was compelled to demand assistance of the local government. Men have no faith in quixotic undertakings. As might have been expected, they complimented Madame Luce upon her energy, saw no use in educating Moorish women, and declined to assist her. She waited, in breathless suspense, till the day on which the Council were to meet, bribing the parents, clothing the children, and pursuing her noble work. "Surely," she thought, "they will devise some plan;" but the twilight of the 30th of December closed in, and they had not even alluded to her school. On the 1st of January, 1846, it was closed. Nine hundred miles from Paris, without the modern conveniences of transport, what do you suppose this woman did? Could she give up? She scorned an offer of personal remuneration made by a few gentlemen, and told them that what she wanted was adequate support for a national work. She pawned her plate, her jewels, even a gold thimble, and set off for Paris, where she arrived early in February, and sent in her report to the Minister of War. She went in person from deputy to deputy, detailing her plans. Poor Madame Luce! her success was not quite so speedy as Alice Holliday's, whose schools had doubtless stimulated her efforts. Everywhere she had to combat the scepticism, the indifference, the inertia, of worldly men. There was no Miss Rogers, with a kind heart and a long purse, to help her on her way. Nor did Madame Luce desire that there should be. She knew that individual efforts of such a kind can never last long; and she was determined to make the government adopt and become responsible for her work. Then it would outlive her. Then it might redeem the nation. At last, daylight began to dawn. The government gave her three thousand francs for her journey, and eleven hundred more on account of some claim of her deceased husband. They urged her return to Algiers, and promised still farther support. So perseveringly had she wrought, that, early in June, she was able to re-open her school, amid the rejoicings of parents and children. It was seven months before the government contrived to put the school on a better foundation. During this time, her pupils constantly increased, and she was put to the greatest straits to keep it together. The Curé of Algiers gave her a little money and a great deal of sympathy. The Count Guyot, high in office, helped her from his own purse. When she was entirely destitute, she would send one of her negresses to him, and he would send her enough for the day. On one occasion, he sent a small bag of money, left by the Duc de Nemours for the benefit of a journal which had ceased to exist. She found in this two hundred francs, which she received as a direct gift from Heaven. Thus she got along from hand to mouth. She engaged an Arab mistress, who was remarkably cultivated, to assist her, and to train the children in her own faith. Pledged as she was not to instruct them in Christianity, she had the sense to see, what few would have admitted, that such instruction was not only necessary, but desirable. It gave them the knowledge of one God, and made clear distinctions between right and wrong. At last, in January, 1847, the school was formally adopted, and received its first visit of inspection. The gentlemen were received by thirty-two pupils, and the Arab mistress unveiled; a great triumph of common sense, if we consider how short a time the school had been opened. Since that time, the work has steadily prospered. In 1858 it numbered one hundred and twenty pupils, between the ages of four and eighteen. The practical wisdom of Madame Luce led her to establish a workshop, where the older pupils learned the value of their labor, and earned a good deal of money. They had always a week's work in advance, when the wise, slow government put an end to it, whether to save the thirty-five pounds a year, which the salary of its superintendent cost, or to prevent competition with the nunneries, Madame Luce has never known. She thought it the best part of her plan,—far better than teaching the girls to turn a French phrase neatly for the satisfaction of inspectors. The government are now beginning to understand her value. They have established a second school in Algiers, and several in the provinces. The results are not miraculous, but they plant new germs of moral power and thought in every family circle which they touch. Such names as those of Alice Holliday and Madame Luce have a great value. These women and their labors are permeated by the Christian idea of self-surrender. The preponderance of this idea in these examples distinguishes them above women of the past, whether German exaltadas, brilliant adventurers amid the perils of the Froude, or witty loiterers in the salon of Madame de Sablé.

La Rochefoucauld, who was proud of Mademoiselle and her princesses, would only have sneered at Madame Luce; nor would Lady Russell, nor Mrs. John Adams, have followed Alice to Egypt cheerfully. Nor do these two women belong to the army of saints and martyrs. A religious devotee has in her a mistaken enthusiasm, and goes away from the world. These women are doing the work of saints and martyrs with a far higher appreciation of God's providence, of the uses of this world, and with all the hindrances that fall to the lot of simple human beings. It is not our intention to multiply such instances here: they belong, rather, to the illustrations of individual power. We must not forget, however, the existence, in England, of that circle of women, of whom Mrs. Bodichon, Mrs. Hugo Reid, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Jameson, and Bessie Raynor Parkes, are honorable examples. We have such lives as those of Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Evans; the scientific reputation not alone of Mrs. Somerville, but of Mrs. Griffith, to whose masculine power of research English marine botany may be said to owe its existence, and who still survives, at an advanced age, to see that knowledge becomes popular, in her cheerful and honored decline, which she pursued, for many a year, unassisted and alone. We have Mrs. Janet Taylor, one of the best and most popular teachers of navigation and nautical mathematics in all England. Her classes have been celebrated and numerously attended by men who have been long at sea, as well as by youths preparing for the merchant service; and, still farther, we have in cultivated circles, to balance the old prejudice, an encouraging liberality. A review, published in the Westminster, after the issue of Miss Martineau's pamphlet on the future government of India, shows conclusively that any woman who will do good work may feel sure of honest appreciation. If she does poor work, she will only the more provoke the enemy. Nothing could have been more ambitious than Miss Martineau's theme; but, when she showed herself well qualified to handle it, no one had any disposition to consider the choice unwomanly. Such criticisms are the exponents of the century's experience. They betray the unconscious drift of the public mind. A book is modest by the side of a pamphlet. The former may wait its day: the latter aspires to immediate influence, if it does any thing,—must mould the hour. It was once the chosen weapon of Milton and Bolingbroke, later of Ward and Brougham. Is it nothing, that a woman of advanced years, writing from an invalid's chamber, feels herself competent to wield it? Was it nothing, when, by her tracts on political economy, she gave an impulse to the middle classes of her native land, for which busy political men could not find time?

Is it not Godwin who says that "human nature is better read in romance than history"? Every actual life falls short of its ideal; but a poem dares demand some approximation to its standard from the whole world. In this way, "Aurora Leigh," into which Mrs. Browning confesses she has thrown her whole heart, is a wonderful indication of human thought and feeling. In this country, there are many significant signs of progress. The name of Maria Mitchell in astronomy; of the women engaged in the Coast Survey; of the professors at Antioch, Vassar, and Oberlin,—are familiarly known, and have their own power. Only lately, a Nashua factory-girl takes the highest honors at the Oread Institute; and its principal is willing to put her and two other graduates into competition with any three college graduates in New England for examination according to the curriculum. When she finished the education she had first earned the money to procure, she left her Worcester home, and, with quiet right-mindedness, went back to Nashua to labor for an indigent family. As she tends her loom on the Jackson Corporation, she will have leisure to investigate her right to these acquisitions.

In support of this "exception," the superintendent of the New-York City Schools, long ago, reported, that its female schools, whether by merit of teachers or pupils or both, are of a much higher grade than the male schools. Eighteen girls'-schools are superior, in average attainment, to the very best boys'-school. He goes on to speak of the rapidity with which women acquire knowledge, in terms which remind us of Margaret Fuller, when she remarks of Dr. Channing, that it was not very pleasant to read to him; "for," said she, "he takes in subjects more deliberately than is conceivable to us feminine people, with our habits of ducking, diving, or flying for truth." In speaking of her classes at Vassar College, Miss Mitchell says (1865): "I have a class of seventeen pupils, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. They come to me for fifty minutes every day. I allow them great freedom in questioning, and I am puzzled by them daily. They show more mathematical ability, and more originality of thought, than I had expected. I doubt whether young men would show as deep an interest. Are there seventeen students in Harvard College who take mathematical astronomy, do you think?"

At the session of the Michigan Legislature, held in 1857-8, petitions were received, asking that women might be permitted to enjoy all the advantages of the State University. The committee to whom the subject was referred, took counsel with the older colleges at the East, whose whole spirit and method is as much opposed to such an idea as that of Oxford. The result was, that they reported against any change for the present,—a report the more to be regretted, as Ann Arbor has a broader University foundation than any institution within the limits of the United States. The University has lately petitioned for a larger endowment, and again an effort has been made to secure its advantages for women; Theodore Tilton pleading before the committee in their behalf, in February, 1867. We know of twenty-seven colleges in the United States, open to men and women, of which Oberlin was the noble pioneer.[6]

The highest culture has been claimed for women: it has been shown, that, for two centuries, the ideal of such a culture has existed, but has been depressed by an erroneous public opinion. There has, however, been a steady growth in the right direction, which entitles us to ask for a "revised and corrected" public opinion. The influence of mental culture is a small thing by the side of that insinuating atmospheric power and the customs of society which it controls. All educated men and women, all liberal souls, therefore, should do their utmost to invigorate public opinion. To allow no weakness to escape us, to challenge every falsehood as it passes, to brave every insinuation and sneer, is what duty demands. Can you not bear to be called "women's-rights women"? To whom has the name ever been agreeable? Society gives the lie to your purest instincts, and you bear it. It calls the truths you accept hard names, and you are dumb. It throws stones, and you shrink behind some ragged social fence, leaving a few weak women to stand the assault alone.

What influence has the highest literary character of America, at this moment, on the popular idea of women? "How much is there that we may not say aloud," wrote Niebuhr to Savigny, "for fear of being stoned by the stupid good people!" and upon this principle the thinkers of our society act; not a word escaping from their guarded homes to cheer the more exposed workers.

Prescott stabbed Philip II. to the heart without a qualm. Ticknor could give a life to the romance of old Spain. Froude has defended Henry VIII. Our best poets sing verses that enslave, since the song of beauty echoes always among tropical delights. "Barbara Frietchie" alone has been written for us. When George Curtis blows his clarion, a courtly throng come at the call. We yield with the rest to the charm of the lips on which Attic bees once clustered. What honor do we pay the fair proportions of the simple truth?

How can we settle questions of right and wrong for remote periods, without knowing the faces of either in the street to-day? How shall any one honor Margaret of Parma, and pity poor crazy Joan in Spain, and have no heart for the heroism of Mary Patton? How unravel with patient study the tracasseries of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, yet ignore the complications of the life he himself lives?

When Mary Patton had carried her ship round Cape Horn,—standing in a parlor where the air was close, though the breezes that entered at its open casement swept the Common as they came, a woman told, with newly kindled enthusiasm, the story of that wonderful voyage. She gave her, in warm words, her wifely and womanly due. "She saved the ship, God bless her!" she said as she concluded; and another voice, that once was sweet, responded, "More shame to her!"

"'More shame to her!'" repeated the first speaker, as if she had been struck a sudden blow; and turning quickly towards the girl, beautiful, well educated, carefully reared, who, in the fulness of her twenty summers, found time for church-going, for clothing the poor, for elegant study, for every thing but sympathy,—"More shame!" she repeated: "What! for saving life and property?"—"Better that they should all have gone to the bottom," returned her friend, "than that one woman should step out of her sphere!" Ah! the Infinite Father knows how to educate the public opinion that we need. Now and then he lifts a woman, as he did Mary Patton, against her will out of her ordinary routine; and, while all the world gaze at her with tender sympathy, they half accept the coming future.

Does it sadden you, that we should repeat such words? They did not shock the ears on which they fell; they met no farther rebuke than one astonished question. Yet what did they represent? Not the public opinion of Mary Patton. The New-York underwriters, when they voted her a thousand dollars, were a fit gauge of that. It was the public opinion of the "right of vocation" that the young girl unconsciously betrayed. Harsh words die on our lips, as we think, "This girl's life is aimless. She would gladly do some noble work, but society does not help her. She lacks courage to stand alone, and envies the very woman she decries."

"Public opinion is of slow growth," you retort: "do not charge its corruptions on the people of to-day."

The people of to-day are responsible for any corruptions which they do not reject.

We have seen that the standard of womanly education does not lead where it should, because controlled by a public opinion which demands too little. It becomes us here to investigate the origin of that public opinion, and to ask the meaning of the lives which have been lived in its despite.

II.

HOW PUBLIC OPINION IS MADE.

"A governed thought, thinking no thought but good,
Makes crowded houses, holy solitude."
Sanscrit Book of Good Counsels.

THE existing public opinion with regard to woman has been formed by the influence of heathen ages and institutions, kept up by a mistaken study of the classics,—a study so pursued, that Athens and Rome, Aristophanes and Juvenal, are more responsible for the popular views of woman, and for the popular mistakes in regard to man's position toward her, than any thing that has been written later.

This influence pervades all history; and so the study of history becomes, in its turn, the source of still greater and more specious error, except to a few rare and original minds, whose eccentricities have been pardoned to their genius, but who have never influenced the world to the extent that they have been influenced by it.

The adages or proverbs of all nations are the outgrowths of their first attempts at civilization. They began at a time which knew neither letter-paper nor the printing-press; and they perpetuate the rudest ideas, such as are every way degrading to womanly virtue. The influence of general literature is impelled by the mingled current. For many centuries, it was the outgrowth of male minds only, of such as had been drilled for seven years at least into all the heathenisms of which we speak.

Women, when they first began to work, followed the masculine idea, shared the masculine culture. As a portion of general literature, the novel, as the most popular, exerts the widest sway. No educational influence in this country compares with it; even that of the pulpit looks trivial beside it. There are thousands whom that influence never reaches; hardly one who cannot beg or buy a newspaper, with its story by some "Sylvanus Cobb."

From the first splash of the Atlantic on a Massachusetts beach to the farthest cañon which the weary footsteps of the Mormon women at this moment press; from the shell-bound coast of Florida, hung with garlands of orange and lime, to the cold, green waters of Lake Superior, in their fretted chalice of copper and gold,—the novel holds its way. On the railroad, at the depot, in the Irish hut, in the Indian lodge, on the steamer and the canal-boat, in the Fifth-avenue palace, and the Five-Points den of infamy, its shabby livery betrays the work that it is doing.

Until very lately, it has kept faith with history and the classics; but it is passing more and more into the hands of women,—of late into the hands of noble and independent women; and there are signs which indicate that it may soon become a potent influence of redemption. It has thus far done infinite harm, by drawing false distinctions between the masculine and feminine elements of human nature, and perpetuating, through the influence of genius often intensifying, the educational power of a false theory of love.

Social customs follow in the train of literature; and sometimes in keeping with popular errors, but oftener in stern opposition to them, are the lives and labors of remarkable individuals of both sexes,—lives that show, if they show nothing else, how much the resolute endeavor of one noble heart may do towards making real and popular its own convictions.

The influence of newspapers sustains, of course, the general current derived from all these sources.

Public opinion, then, flows out of these streams,—out of classical literature, history, general reading, and the proverbial wisdom of all lands; out of social conventions, and customs and newspapers. These streams set one way. Only individual influences remain, to stem their united force.

We must treat of them more at length, and first of the classics. Until very lately, there were no proper helps to the study of Egyptian, Greek, or Roman mythology. It was studied by the letter, and made to have more or less meaning, according to the teacher who interpreted it. Lemprière had no room for moral deductions or symbolic indications; his columns read like a criminal report in the "New-York Herald." The Egyptian mythology was, doubtless, an older off-shoot from the same stem. Many of its ceremonies, its symbols, and its idols, must be confused by the uninstructed mind with realities of the very lowest, perhaps we should not be far wrong if we said, of the most revolting stamp. The Greek classics, so far as I know them, present a singular mixture of influences; but, where woman is concerned, the lowest certainly preponderate. We should be sorry to lose Homer and Æschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, from our library; but of how many poets and dramatists, from the few fragments of Pindar and Anacreon down through the tragic poets,—down, very far down, indeed, to Aristophanes,—can we say as much?

There need be no doubt about Aristophanes. The world would be the purer, and all women grateful, if every copy of his works, and every coarse inference from them, could be swept out of existence to-morrow. When we find a noble picture in Xenophon, it had a noble original, like Panthea in Persia, as old perhaps as that fine saying in the Heetopades which all the younger Veds disown. When we find an ignoble thought, it seems to have been born out of his Greek experience. Transported by a fair ideal, Plato asks, in his "Republic," "Should not this sex, which we condemn to obscure duties, be destined to functions the most noble and elevated?" But it was only to take back the words in his "Timæus," and in the midst of a society that refused to let the wife sit at table with the husband, and whose young wives were not "tame" enough to speak to their husbands, if we may believe the words of Xenophon, until after months of marriage. When Iscomachus, the model of an Athenian husband, and the friend of Socrates, asked his wife if she knew whether he had married her for love, "I know nothing," she replied, "but to be faithful to you, and to learn what you teach." He responded by an exhortation on "staying at home," which has come down to posterity, and left her, with a kiss, for the saloon of Aspasia! Pindar and Anacreon, even when they find no better representatives than Dr. Wolcott and Tom Moore, still continue to crown the wine-cup, and impart a certain grace to unmanly orgies. A late French writer goes so far as to call Euripides "a woman-hater, who could not pardon Zeus for having made woman an indispensable agent in the preservation of the species." In his portraits of Iphigenia and Macaria, Euripides follows his conception of heroic, not human nature. They are demi-goddesses; yet how are their white robes stained!

Iphigenia says,—

"More than a thousand women is one man
Worthy to see the light of day;"

a sentiment which has prevailed ever since.

"Silence and a chaste reserve
Is woman's genuine praise, and to remain
Quiet within the house,"

proceeds Macaria, and still farther:—

"Of prosperous future could I form
One cheerful hope?
A poor forsaken virgin who would deign
To take in marriage? Who would wish for sons
From one so wretched? Better, then, to die
Than bear such undeservèd miseries!"

Here is the popular idea which curses society to-day,—no vocation possible to woman, if she may not be a wife, and bear children: and these are favorable specimens; they show the practical tendencies of the very best of Euripides. The heroic portions are like Miriam's song, and have nothing to do with us and our experiences.

In speaking of Aristophanes, I do not speak ignorantly. I know how much students consider themselves indebted to him for details of manners and customs, for political and social hints, for a sort of Dutch school of pen-painting.

But if a nation's life be so very vile, if crimes that we cannot name and do not understand be among its amusements, why permit the record to taint the mind and inflame the imagination of youth? Why put it with our own hands into the desks of those in no way prepared to use it? Would you have wit and humor? Sit down with Douglas Jerrold, or to the genial table spread by our Boston Autocrat, and you will have no relish left for the coarse fare of the Athenian. One of the most vulgar assaults ever made upon the movement to elevate woman in this country was made in a respectable quarterly by a Greek scholar. It was sustained by quotations from Aristophanes, and concluded by copious translations from one of his liveliest plays, offered as a specimen of the "riot and misrule" that we ambitious women were ready to inaugurate. Coarser words still our Greek scholar might have taken from the same source to illustrate his theory. He knew very well that the nineteenth century would bear hints, insinuations, sneers, any thing but plain speaking. We have limits: he observed them, and forbore. Women sometimes talk of Aristophanes as if they had read his plays with pleasure; a thing for which we can only account by supposing that they do not take the whole significance of what they read,—and this is often the case with men. But a college furnishes helps. The mysteries of the well-thumbed English key are translated afresh into what we may call "college slang," illustrated oftentimes by clever if vulgar caricatures, where a few significant lines tell in a moment what a pure mind would have pondered years without perceiving; and if, perchance, some modest woman finds her friend or lover at this work, society says only: "You should not have touched the young man's book. What harm for him to amuse himself?—only women should never find it out! Keep them pure, no matter what becomes of men. What business had you to know the meaning of those pencil marks?"

Even St. John does not hesitate to condemn Aristophanes.[7] "With an art in which Shakespeare was no mean proficient," he begins, "he opens up a more culpable source of interest in the frequent satire of vices condemned as commonly as they are practised. He unveils the mysteries of iniquity with a fearless and by no means an unreluctant hand. He ventures fearlessly on themes which few before or since have touched, despising the stern condemnation of posterity. He evidently shared in the worst corruptions of his age, and, like many other satirists, availed himself joyfully of the mask of satire to entertain his own imagination with his own descriptions. No one, with the least clear-sightedness or candor, can fail to perceive the depraved moral character of Aristophanes. Only less filthy than Rabelais, his fancy runs riot among the moral jakes and common sewers of the world, over which, by consummate art and the matchless magic of his style, he contrives unhappily to breathe a fragrance which should never be found save where virtue is."

When I first took up my pen, knowing well that I should speak of Margaret Fuller's beloved Greeks in a tone somewhat different from hers, I did not know that I should have the sympathy of a single eminent scholar.

It was with no common pleasure, therefore, that, opening her Life at random, one day, I chanced upon these words from her own pen. She is speaking of a class of private pupils:—

"I have always thought all that was said about the anti-religious tendency of a classical education to be 'auld wives' tales.' But the puzzles (of my pupils) about Virgil's notions of heaven and virtue, and his gracefully described gods and goddesses, have led me to alter my opinions; and I suspect, from reminiscences of my own mental history, that, if all teachers do not think the same, it is from the want of an intimate knowledge of their pupils' minds. I really find it difficult to keep their morale steady, and am inclined to think many of my own sceptical sufferings are traceable to this source. I well remember what reflections arose in my childish mind from a comparison of the Hebrew history, where every moral obliquity is shown out with such naïveté, and the Greek history, full of sparkling deeds and brilliant sayings, and their gods and goddesses, the types of beauty and power, with the dazzling veil of flowery language and poetical imagery cast over their vices and failings."[8]

We may be permitted also to quote, from the competent pen of Buckle, the following words:—

"We have only to open the Greek literature," he says, in his lecture on "The Condition of Women," "to see with what airs of superiority, with what serene and lofty contempt, with what mocking and biting scorn, women were treated by that lively and ingenious people, who looked upon them merely as toys."

Alas! we need no prophet to show that what pollutes the mind of youth and lover, by polluting the ideal of society, must soon pollute the mind of maiden and mistress. Is that a Christian country which permits this style of thinking? and how many men of the world accept the stainless virginity of Christ as the world's pattern of highest manliness?

Passing from Greece to Rome, you will see that even as we owe to Roman law, before the time of Justinian, almost all that is obnoxious in the English, retaining still the strange old Latin terms which were applied to our relations in a very barbarous state of society; so we owe to the time of Augustus, to the influence of satirists like Horace and Juvenal, almost all the wide-spread heresies in regard to human nature: if we had but time to look at it, we might say Calvinism among the rest.

The views of women are still lower. Cæsar and Cicero may be abstract nullities to our young student; but what can he learn from Ovid? It is not delicate to name the "Art of Love." In simple, honest truth, it is the same to read the Metamorphoses. You cannot ventilate a gross man's atmosphere; all the Betsy Trotwoods must toss their cushions on the lawn when he leaves the room. It is the old difference between "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold," only less. In the first, the unvarnished play of passion may disgust you until it instructs; in the second, you have the despairing misanthropy, the false philosophy, the devil in Gabriel's own garment, which is always fascinating to the young, morbid with the stimulus of growth, and which you might mistake for piety if you did not know it was born of the lassitude left by excess.

Latin mythology was but the corruption of the older types. What was beauty once became here undisguised coarseness or worse. The gods who once endured sin now patronized and made money by it. These things are not without their influence. Above all, low images, witty slang, and sharp satire, have force beyond their own, when slowly studied out by the help of the lexicon. The women to whom I speak know this very well. They know that the Molière, the Dante, the Schiller, studied at school, are never forgotten. They smile to hear men call them hard to read: for them they glow with clear and significant meaning. Striking passages are indelibly impressed by associations of time or place or page, which can never be forgotten. I would not put an end to classical study; I would only direct attention, through such remarks, to the dangers attendant on the present manner of study. Classical teachers should not be chosen for their learning alone. No Lord Chesterfield should teach manners, but some one whose daily "good morning" is precious. So no coarse, low-minded man should interpret Greek or Roman, but some noble soul, not indifferent to social progress, capable of discriminating, and of letting in a little Christian light upon those pagan times. Where men and women are taught together, this thing settles itself; and this is a very strong argument for institutions like Antioch and Oberlin.

Then might the period passed at the Latin school and the college become of the greatest moral and intellectual use. Then would no graduating students run the risk of hearing from their favorite doctor of divinity, instead of sound scriptural exhortation, some doctrine whisked out of Epicurus, by a clever but unconscious leger-de-plume.

Do not tell us, O excellent man! that you have gone through all this training, and come out with your soul unstained. We look at you, and see a temperament cold as ice, passions and imagination that were never at a blood-heat since you were born, that never translated the cold paper image into the warm deed of your conscious mental life; and you shall not answer for us, nor for our children.

In leaving this branch of our subject to be more fitly pursued by others, we ought to add that mental purity is not enough insisted upon for either sex. It is only by the greatest faithfulness from the beginning in this respect that we become capable of "touching pitch" at a mature age, in a way to benefit either ourselves or the community. How desirable it is to keep the young eye steadily gazing at the light till it feels all that is lost in darkness, to keep the atmosphere serene and holy till the necessary conflicts of life begin! For such a dayspring to existence no price could be too high; and, if desirable to all, it is essential to those who inherit degrading tendencies.

We must speak now of history. For the most part, it has been written by men devoid of intentional injustice to the sex; but, when a man sits in a certain light, he is penetrated by its color, as the false shades in our omnibuses strike the fairest bloom black and blue. If the positive knowledge and Christian candor of the nineteenth century cannot compel Macaulay to confess that he has libelled the name of William Penn, what may be expected of the mistakes occasioned by the ignorance, the inadvertence, or the false theories of the past? Clearly that they also will remain uncorrected.

If men start with the idea that woman is an inferior being, incapable of wide interests, and created for their pleasure alone; if they enact laws and establish customs to sustain these views; if, for the most part, they shut her into hareems, consider her so dangerous that she may not walk the streets without a veil,—they will write history in accordance with such views, and, whatever may be the facts, they will be interpreted to suit them. They will dwell upon the lives which their theories explain: they will touch lightly or ignore those that puzzle them. We shall hear a great deal of Cleopatra and Messalina, of the mother of Nero and of Lucretia Borgia, of Catharine de Medicis and Marie Stuart, of the beautiful Gabrielle and Ninon de L'Enclos. They will tell us of bloody Mary, and that royal coquette, Elizabeth; and possibly of some saints and martyrs, not too grand in stature to wear the strait-jacket of their theories.

If they think that purity is required of woman alone, and all license permitted to man, they will value female chastity for the service it does poetry and the state, but never maidenhood devoted to noble uses and conscious of an immortal destiny.

Hypatia of Alexandria, noble and queenly, so queenly that those who did not understand, dared not libel her,—Hypatia, a woman of intellect so keen and grasping, that she would have been eminent in the nineteenth century, and may be met in the circles of some future sphere, erect and calm, by the side of our own Margaret Fuller,—she, who died a stainless virgin, torn in pieces by dogs, because she tried to shelter some wretched Jews from Christian wrath, and could even hold her Neo-Platonism a holier thing than that disgraced Christianity,—what do we know of her? Only the little which the letters of Synesius preserve, only the testimony borne by a few Christians, fathers of the Church now, but outlawed then by the popular grossness! Yet, a pure and fragrant waif from the dark ocean of that past, her name was permitted to float down to us, till Kingsley caught it, and, with the unscrupulousness of the advocate, stained it to serve his purpose.[9]

It would have been no matter, had not genius set its seal on the work, and so made it doubtful whether history has any Hypatia left. We must not fail to utter constant protest against such unfairness; and to assert again and again, that not a single weakness or folly attributed to Hypatia by the novelist—neither the worship of Venus Anadyomene nor the prospective marriage with the Roman governor, neither the superstitious fears, the ominous self-conceit, nor the half conscious personal ambition—is in the least sustained by the facts of history. She was pure and stainless: let us see to it that such memories are rescued.

And there is still another name, deeply wronged by the prejudice and party spirit of the past, which it is quite possible to redeem: I mean that of Aspasia. For many centuries, the very sound of it suggested an image of all womanly grace and genius, devoid of womanly virtue; the insight of a seer, the eloquence of an orator, but the voluptuousness of a courtesan. Very lately, the manly justice of Thirlwall and Grote, and the exquisite taste and imagination of Walter Savage Landor, have striven to repair the wrong. Her reputation fell a victim to the gross puns of Aristophanes, himself the hired mouth-piece of a political party that hated her, and whose misrepresentations were so contemptible in the eyes of Pericles, that he would not interfere to prevent them.

Would you have the history of that immortal marriage written truly?

Imagine the Greek ruler married, for some years, to a woman of the noblest Athenian blood, already the mother of two children, but one who, if irreproachable in conduct, was utterly incapable of taking in the scope of his plans, or sharing his lofty, adventurous thought. After years of weariness passed in her society, with no rest for his heart and no inspiration for his genius, there came to Athens a woman and a foreigner, in whom he found his peer,—a woman who gathered round her in a moment all that there was of free and noble in that world of poetry, statesmanship, and art. She was from the islands of the Archipelago, and, like the women of her country, walked the streets with her face unveiled.

Hardly had she come, before Socrates and Plato, and Anaxagoras the pure old man, became her frequent guests, and honored her with the name of friend. In such a society, Pericles saw that his own soul would grow; so sustained, he should be more for Athens and himself. He was no Christian to deny himself for the sake of that unhappy wife and children,—a wife whose discontent had already infected the state. The gods he knew—Zeus and Eros—smiled on the step he took. What if the laws of Athens forbade a legal marriage with a foreigner? Pericles was Athens; and what he respected, all men must honor. Aspasia had, so far as we know, a free maiden heart; and Pericles shows us in what light he regarded her, by divorcing his wife to consolidate their union, and subsequently forcing the courts to legitimate her child. Had he omitted these proofs of his own sincerity and her honor, not a voice would have been raised against either. What need to take these steps, if she were the woman Aristophanes would have us see?

This divorce created or strengthened the political opposition to Pericles. This opposition was headed by his two sons and their forsaken mother, joined by the pure Athenian blood to which theirs was akin, and gained all its strength and popularity from the wit and falsehood of Aristophanes and the players.

Follow the story as it goes, and see Aspasia, at last, summoned before the Areopagus. What are the charges against her? The very same that were preferred against her friends, Socrates and Anaxagoras. "She walks the streets unveiled, she sits at the table with men, she does not believe in the Greek gods, she talks about one sole Creator, she has original ideas about the motions of the sun and moon; therefore her society corrupts youth." Not a word about vice of any sort. Is it for abandoned women that the best men of any age are willing to entreat before a senate? The tears which Pericles shed then for Aspasia glitter like gems on the historic page.

When the plague came, his first thought was for her safety; and, after his death, her name shares the retirement of her widowed life. There was a rumor that she afterward married a rich grazier, whom she raised to eminence in the state. Not unlikely that such a rumor might grow in the minds of those who had not forgotten the great men she made, when they saw the success of Lysicles; but other authors assert that his wife was the Aspasia who was also known as a midwife in Athens.

It is a noble picture, it seems to me; and when we consider the prejudice of a Christian age and country, the mob that a Bloomer skirt will attract in our own cities, we need not wonder that slander followed an unveiled face in Athens.

What do we know of the women of the age of Augustus?—of the galaxy that spanned the sky of Louis XIV.?

Do you remember, as you read of those crowds of worthless women, what sort of public opinion educated them,—what sort of public opinion such histories tend to form? Do you ever ask any questions concerning the men of the same eras,—how they employed their time, and what part they took in those games of wanton folly? It is time that some one should: and I cannot help directing your attention to the significant fact, that while the word "mistress," applied to a woman, serves at once to mark her out for reprobation, there is no corresponding term, which, applied to man, produces the same effect; and this because the interests of the state are still paramount to the interests of the soul itself.

In speaking of the court of Charles II., Dr. William Alexander says, in 1799: "Its tone ruined all women: they were either adored as angels, or degraded to brute beasts. The satirists, who immediately arose, despised what they had themselves created, and gave the character to every line that has since been written concerning women," down to the verses of Churchill, and that often-quoted, well-remembered line of Pope, with which we need not soil our lips.

We may quote here a criticism upon the "Cinq-Mars" of Alfred de Vigny, taken from Lady Morgan's "France." You will find it especially interesting, because it bears on what has been suggested of the influence of history, and may be compared with a portion of one of Margaret Fuller's letters, in which she criticises the same work, and makes, in her own way, parallel reflections.

"I dipped also," says Lady Morgan, "into the 'Cinq-Mars' of Alfred de Vigny, a charming production. It gives the best course of practical politics, in its exposition of the miseries and vices incidental to the institutions of the middle ages. Behold Richelieu and Louis XIII. in the plenitude of their bad passions and unquestioned power, when—

'Torture interrogates and Pain replies.'

Behold, too, their victims,—Urbain, Grandier, De Thou, Cinq-Mars, and the long, heart-rending list of worth, genius, and innocence immolated. With such pictures in the hands of the youth of France, it is impossible they should retrograde. How different from the works of Louis XV.'s days, when the Marivaux, Crebillons, and Le Clos wrote for the especial corruption of that society from whose profligacy they borrowed their characters, incidents, and morals! Men would not now dare to name, in the presence of virtuous women, works which were once in the hands of every female of rank in France,—works which, like the novels of Richardson, had the seduction of innocence for their story, and witty libertinism and triumphant villany for their principal features.

"With such a literature, it was almost a miracle that one virtuous woman or one honest man was left in the country to create that revolution which was to purify its pestiferous atmosphere. Admirable for its genius, this work is still more so for its honesty."

In the praise given to this new literature is implied the censure passed upon the old. Of direct educational literature, we may say, that all writers, from Rousseau to Gregory, Fordyce, and the very latest in our own country, have exercised an enervating influence over public opinion, and helped to form the popular estimate of female ability. Rousseau's influence is still powerful. Let me quote from his "Emilius:" "Researches into abstract and speculative truths, the principles and axioms of science,—in short, every thing which tends to generalize ideas,—is out of the province of woman. All her ideas should be directed to the study of men. As to works of genius, they are beyond her capacity. She has not precision enough to succeed in accurate science; and physical knowledge belongs to those who are most active and most inquisitive."

Alas for Mary Somerville, Janet Taylor, and Maria Mitchell, as well as for the popular idea that women are a curious sex! He goes on: "Woman should have the skill to incline us to do every thing which her sex will not enable her to do of herself. She should learn to penetrate the real sentiments of men, and should have the art to communicate those which are most agreeable to them, without seeming to intend it."

This sounds somewhat barefaced; but it is the model of all the advice which society is still giving. It is refreshing to catch the first gleam of something better from the author of "Sandford and Merton." "If women," says Mr. Day, "are in general feeble both in body and mind, it arises less from nature than from education. We encourage a vicious indolence and inactivity, which we falsely call delicacy. Instead of hardening their minds by the severer principles of reason and philosophy, we breed them to useless arts which terminate in vanity or sensuality. They are taught nothing but idle postures and foolish accomplishments." Dr. Gregory recommends dissimulation. Dr. Fordyce advises women to increase their power by reserve and coldness! When we hear of the educational restraints still exercised, of the innocent amusements forbidden, the compositions which may be written, but not read, lest the young girl might some time become the lecturer,—we cannot but feel that the step is not so very long from that time and country to this, and wonder at the folly which still refuses to trust the laws of God to a natural development. It is mortifying, too, to listen to the silly rhapsodies of Madame de Staël. "Though Rousseau has endeavored," she says, "to prevent women from interfering in public affairs, and acting a brilliant part in political life, yet, in speaking of them, how much has he done it to their satisfaction! If he wished to deprive them of some rights foreign to their sex, how has he for ever asserted for them all those to which it has a claim! What signifies it," she continues, "that his reason disputes with them for empire, while his heart is still devotedly theirs?"

What signifies it? It signifies a great deal. It signifies all the difference between life in a solitary seraglio, and life with God's world for an inheritance; all the difference between being the worn-out toy of one sensualist, and the inspiration of an unborn age; all the difference between the butterfly and the seraph, between the imprisoned nun and Longfellow's sweet St. Philomel. When we read these words, we thank Margaret Fuller for the very criticism which once moved a girlish ire. "De Staël's name," she wrote, "was not clear of offence; she could not forget the woman in the thought. Sentimental tears often dimmed her eagle glance." What a grateful contrast to all such sentimentalism do we find in Margaret's own sketch of the early life of Miranda!

"This child was early led to feel herself a child of the spirit. She took her place easily in the world of mind. A dignified sense of self-dependence was given as all her portion, and she found it a sure anchor. Her relations with others were fixed with equal security. With both men and women they were noble; affectionate without passion, intellectual without coldness. The world was free to her, and she lived freely in it. Outward adversity came, and inward conflict; but that self-respect had early been awakened, which must always lead at last to an outward security and an inward peace." Here is the great difficulty in the education of woman, to lead her to a point from which she shall naturally develop self-respect, and learn self-help. Old prejudices extinguish her as an individual, oblige her to renounce the inspiration in herself, and yield to all the weaknesses and wickednesses of man. Look at Chaucer's beau-ideal of a wife in the tale of Griselda, dwindled now into the patient Grissel of modern story. In her a woman is represented as perfect, because she ardently and constantly loved a monster who gained her by guile, and brutally abused her. Put the matter into plain English, and see if you would respect such a woman now. No: and therefore is it somewhat sad, that, in Tennyson's new Idyll, he must recreate this ideal in the Enid of Geraint; and that, out of four pictures of womanly love, only one seems human and natural, and that, the guilty love of Guinevère. The recently awakened interest in the position of woman is flooding the country with books relating to her and her sphere. They have, their very titles have, an immense educational influence. Let me direct your attention to one published in Boston by a leading house last winter, and entitled "Remarkable Women of Different Ages and Nations." Let us read the names of the thirteen women with whose lives it seeks to entertain the public:—

Beatrice Cenci, the parricide.
Charlotte Corday, the assassin.
Joanna Southcote, the English prophetess.
Jemima Wilkinson, the American prophetess.
Madame Ursinus, the poisoner.
Madame Göttfried, the poisoner.
Mademoiselle Clairon, the actress.
Harriet Mellon, the actress.
Madame Lenormand, the fortune-teller.
Angelica Kauffman, the artist.
Mary Baker, the impostor.
Pope Joan, the pontiff.
Joan of Arc, the warrior.

Look at the list! Assassins, parricides, and poisoners, fortune-tellers, and actresses! Let us hope they will always remain remarkable! In this list we have the name of one woman who never lived, and of four at least who in this country would owe all their celebrity to the police court; and this while history pants to be delivered of noble lives not known at all, like the women of the House of Montefeltro, or little known, like the pure and heroic wife of Condé, Clemence de Maillé. And by what black art, let us ask, are such names as Beatrice, and Charlotte Corday, sweet Joan of Arc, and dear Angelica Kauffman, a noble woman, whose happiness was wrecked upon a fiendish jest, juggled into this list? As well might you put Brutus who killed great Cæsar, and Lucretia of spotless fame, and Andrea del Sarto who loved a faithless wife, into the same category. Such association, however false, helps to educate the popular mind.

Of the power of adages, and that barbaric experience and civilization of which they are generally the exponent, we might write volumes; but the subject must be dismissed in this connection without a word. We must pass on to consider the force of social instincts and prejudices which underlie this general literature, and are as much stronger than it as the character of a man is stronger than his intellectual quality. A lecturer once said, "that the first prejudice which women have to encounter is one which exists before they are born, which leads fathers instinctively to look forward to the birth of sons, and to leave little room in their happy or ambitious schemes for the coming of a daughter." Not long since, a highly educated Englishman told me that this remark smote him to the heart. "I never expected to have any thing but a son," he declared; "and, when my little Minnie was born, I had made no preparation for her. I had neither a thought nor a scheme at her service."

Fanny Wright, in some essays published thirty years ago, says, "There are some parents who take one step in duty, and halt at the second. Our sons," they say, "will have to exercise political rights, and fill public offices. We must help them to whatever knowledge there is going, and make them as sharp-witted as their neighbors. As for our daughters, they can never be any thing; in fact, they are nothing. We give them to their mothers, who will take them to church and dancing-school, and, with the aid of fine clothes, fit them out for the market.

"But," she goes on to say, "let possibilities be what they will, no man has a right to calculate on them for his sons. He has only to consider them as human beings, and insure them a full development of all the faculties which belong to them as such. So, as respects his daughters, he has nothing to do with the injustice of law, nor the absurdities of society. His duty is plain,—to train them up as human beings, to seek for them, and with them, all just knowledge. Who among men contend best with the difficulties of life and society,—the strong-minded or the weak, the wise or the foolish? Who best control and mould opposing circumstances,—the educated or the ignorant? What is true of them is true of women also."

In the customs of nations, women find the most discouraging educational influences. While with us these customs all set one way, they are easily broken through by the untutored races, who still rely on the force of their primal instincts. When Captain Wallis went to see the Queen of Otaheite, a marsh which crossed the way proved a formidable obstacle to the puny Anglo-Saxon. No sooner did the queen perceive it, than, taking him up as if he were a meal-bag, she threw him over her shoulder, and strode along. Nobody smiled; even Captain Wallis does not appear to have felt mortified. These people were accustomed to the physical strength of their queen. It would be well if civilized nations could imitate them, far enough at least to remember, that wherever strength, whether mental or physical, is found, there it certainly belongs.

In Peru and the Formosa Isles, it is the women who choose their husbands, and not the men who choose their wives; and, from the moment of marriage, the man takes up his abode in his wife's family. Lord of creation in every other respect, he still owes to her whatever social standing and privileges he may possess. Such an exception is valueless, save that it shows us that sex does not absolutely, of itself, determine such customs.

The African kings are permitted to have many wives; but they respect the chastity of women, and require it. Dr. Livingstone tells us of an instance in which the royal succession finally lapsed upon a woman. Her counsellors forbade her to marry a single husband, telling her that it would create jealousies and divisions in the tribe. She must follow the royal custom. But pure womanly nature spoke louder than the counsellors. The poor queen renounced marriage altogether, and associated a half-brother in the government, upon whose children she settled the succession. Let this beautiful fact shame those coward souls who fear to trust to the instinctive purity of the sex.

He goes on to state, in a recent letter, that he has found nothing more remarkable, among the highly intelligent tribes of the Upper Sambesi, than the respect universally accorded to women.

"Many of the tribes are governed by a female chief. If you demand any thing of a man," remarks the intrepid explorer, "he replies, 'I will talk with my wife about it.' If the woman consents, your demand is granted. If she refuse, you will receive a negative reply. Women vote in all the public assemblies. Among the Bushwanas and Kaffirs, the men swear by their fathers; but among the veritable Africans, occupying the centre of the continent, they always swear by their mother. If a young man falls in love with a maiden of another village, he leaves his own, and takes up his dwelling in hers. He is obliged to provide in part for the maintenance of his mother-in-law, and to assume a respectful attitude, a sort of semi-kneeling, in her presence. I was so much astonished at all these marks of respect for women, that I inquired of the Portuguese if such had always been the habit of the country. They assured me that such had always been the case."

If women were unwise managers of money,—a statement frequently made, but which we may safely deny,—it would be owing to the custom which has, through long ages, put the purse in the hands of "their master;" a custom so old, that to "husband" one's resources is a phrase which expresses man's pecuniary responsibility, and is always equivalent to locking one's money up. "It will be time enough," says Mrs. Kirkland, "to expect from woman a just economy when she is permitted to distribute a portion of the family resources. Witness those proud subscription-lists where one reads, 'Mr. B., twenty dollars;' and, just below, 'Mrs. B., ten dollars,'—which ten dollars Mrs. B. never saw, and would ask for in vain to distribute for her own pleasure."

And this custom has such educational force, that very liberal men refuse the smallest pecuniary independence to their wives to their very dying day. "The Turk does not lock up his wife with more care than the Christian his strong box. To that lock there is ever but one key, and that the master carries in his pocket. The case is not altered when the wife is about to close her weary eyes in death. She may have earned or inherited or saved the greater part of their common property, but without his consent she cannot bequeath a dollar." This passage reminds us of a criticism on the marriage service attributed to Sir John Bowring. This eccentric man considers it wicked from beginning to end. "Look at it," he says: "'with this ring I thee wed,'—that's sorcery; 'with my body I thee worship,'—that's idolatry; 'and with all my worldly goods I thee endow,'—that's a lie!"

It is the long customs of mankind which stand in the way of educating women to trades and professions. These matters are mainly in woman's own hands. One is glad to see in the English Parliament certain statements made in this connection, and others also in a London pamphlet on the nature of municipal government. In reply to the common argument that women ought not to enter certain vocations, because they would ultimately find themselves incompetent, it is stated, that, in all delicate handicrafts, men do the same. Thus, of those who learn to make watches and watchmakers' tools, not one-fifth continue in the trade; and, in the decoration of that delicate ware called Bohemian glass, by far the greater portion of apprentices give it up on account of natural unfitness.

It is the customs of society which sustain the prejudice against literary women. When Dr. Aikin published his "Miscellaneous Pieces," Fox met him in the street. "I particularly admire," said the orator, complimenting him, "your essay on Inconsistency."—"That," said Aikin, "is my sister's."—"Ah! well, I like that on Monastic Institutions."—"That is also hers," replied the honest man; and, in a tumult of confusion, Fox bowed himself away. Had public feeling been right, how gracefully he might have congratulated the brother on his sister's ability, how gladly might that brother have seen her excel himself! This sister was that Mrs. Barbauld who afterward did such womanly service, that we feel tempted to forgive the early fit of sentimentality which found vent in that rhymed nonsense, concluding,—

"Your best, your sweetest empire is to please."

The manners of men have their educational influence. The quiet turning-aside from women when matters of business, politics, or science are discussed; the common saying, "What have women to do with that? let them mind their knitting, or their house affairs;" the short answer when an interested question is asked, "You wouldn't understand it, if I told you,"—all these depress and enervate, and, even if not spoken, the spirit of them animates all social life. "Men are suspicious," wrote Dr. Alexander in 1790, "that a rational education would open the eyes of women, and prompt them to assert the rights of which they have always been deprived." But education could not be withheld nor eyes closed for ever; therefore the time has come to claim these rights. The Sorbonne is already asked why it confers degrees upon women with one hand, while it quietly locks Margaret Fuller out of Arago's lecture-room with the other. Need we inquire what influence it would have upon society, if all literature and scientific opportunities, if all societies devoted to natural history and mathematics, if all colleges and public libraries the world over, were thrown open to woman?

In inferior circles, where no leading minds preside, it would be as it is now: there would be much idle prating, much foolish delay, much inconsequent discussion; but woman is quick to recognize genius, to listen when wisdom speaks. She chatters, to be sure, in the presence of fools; but, when earnest men come to know the value of her enthusiasm, they will never be willing to lose it. When the great door of the scholarly and scientific retreat is once thrown open, you will be surprised to see the crowd ready to enter; and, when the sexes kindle into intellectual life together, many a woman's coals will be modestly laid upon an honored altar, and the flames will rise all the higher because they have been so fed.

How can we estimate sufficiently the corrupting influence of the newspapers of the land?

We may hope your prejudices will defend woman here, and you will acknowledge that the minds cannot be kept pure before whom their details are set. Let us go farther, and say that they cannot be kept pure, coming in contact as they do with minds among men that gloat over such records. God is just, and his compensations are terrible. If you do not spare the purity of the lowest in the land, you cannot save that of your wife and daughter. If you will not protect the vulgar against themselves, you cannot protect the refined against the vulgar. He is not a pure man, who, among his fellows, thinks a thought or utters a word he would blush to have his sister hear. She is not a pure woman, who, in the seclusion of her chamber, or gossip with her household, omits one of the proprieties which delicacy requires. She has no title to our respect, who is not secure in her own. How can we reach such a standard as this, if we invite pollution daily across our threshold, and call it harmless because it dresses in printer's ink? It is not enough that much of the obscenity is pure invention. The profit of the scandal overbalances the cost of the libel. The simplest item is turned to gross account. Even the intimation that the postmaster has placed a woman at the ladies' window in New York has to be coupled with the insinuation that she would have "done better at the gentlemen's." What business have you or I with details that concern only judge and jury? What good does it do society to quote high legal authority upon "flirtation," unless, indeed, we learn thereby to estimate aright the corrupting power of the first wrong step? Police reports, vulgar anecdotes, shocking accidents, and trivial gossip a child might be ashamed to repeat, make up the mass of our daily sheets. Happy is the editor who offers three columns of common sense daily to his readers. When, alas! shall we have a public willing to pay for common sense and pure reading alone?

A woman ought to turn like a flash of light from a foul page, a coarse and vulgar word. No wit should ever tempt her to read the one, or repeat the other; and what I say of woman, I mean of man. I have not two separate moral standards for the sexes.

Margaret Fuller speaks somewhere of certain habits of impure speech which she had heard attributed to ladies in a New-York hotel. What foundation that story had, we may never find; but all of us know some women before whom we keep the coldest reserve, and with whom we would never touch many a subject we should be willing to discuss with any pure-minded man. Ladies! Not all the gold of Pactolus, not all the beauty of Anadyomene, not all the wisdom of Minerva, could make such women ladies! We cannot redeem the poor denizens of Five Points till we have redeemed those of the Fifth Avenue.

Our own children must prattle oaths, if we will not hush the drunken brawler in the streets.