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young mother is among my readers, let her consider whether her fancy for her first baby renders her slack in her duty to her husband. If so, she is on the point of losing a woman's. greatest imaginable happinesscomplete identity with the man she loves. Consider, I entreat you, girl-mother, whose child seems such a pretty toy, that its future is unknown to you; that it is merely a nice little animal, which may die early, or grow up to be altogether worthless; that whatever its destiny, when it reaches perfection (or even before) it will leave its mother and seek alien love-doing, indeed, precisely what you have done. Treat it lovingly, but not dotingly. Remember that your husband is, to you, the first man on the surface of this planet. Do not mentally dethrone him in favour of a baby. a creature whose body is in the gelatinous, and its soul in the nebulous stage.

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Modern parents make a double mistake:

they spoil children in their earlier and are afraid of them in their later years. A pert precocity is hereby encouraged: laughable at eight, it becomes a nuisance at eighteen. Young people of the latter age amaze one with their self-sufficiency; they have made up their minds on all questions of religion and politics; they may tolerate their parents perchance, but are pretty sure to regard their grandfathers and grandmothers with undisguised contempt, as relics of a much mistaken world. The boy is probably a Republican and a Deist; the girl a Tory and High Churchwoman. Ir... for at that age the distinctive pronouns He and She are not yet applicable... IT, I say, is quite decided in its opinions, laughing to scorn all attempts to argue with it. Indeed it is only too pleased to argue with its seniors, and to claim for its own intuitions superiority over their hard-won experience. The reason of all this is clear enough: because we have

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contracted the span of life, we bring our children forward too rapidly, and just when they are at the stage for beginning to learn, they have made up their minds about everything. Even if wisdom comes to them later in life, it is not without arduous effort and much shame for their own early folly.

Boys of the middle class are often obliged to take a manly position much too early, from pecuniary necessity. This is probably unavoidable in the present state of society: the evil fruit of it is visible in the deficiency of culture and paucity of ideas which often surprise one in mercantile men of great wealth. Assuming the absolute necessity of this, it is not so with girls, and if girls of that class were kept back and taught more carefully, and fed with ideas instead of with follies and accomplishments, they might be infinitely serviceable . . . to their brothers, first, to their husbands, after. A boy goes at fifteen into a counting-house, and at five

and-thirty is a prosperous merchant; if at that age he were to marry a refined and cultivated girl of his own rank, ten years younger than himself, with all her tastes and faculties harmoniously developed, with a preference for art over dress and for literature over flirtation, would she not humanize and civilize him? Seeing that commerce is the great business of the mass of Englishmen, this is a matter worth deliberate thought. It is surely possible that a man in the prime of early manhood, being above the necessity of sordid toil, might gladly find leisure to recommence his education. Why should not his wife be his tutor? But to this end she must have travelled beyond the limits of Pinnock and Mangnall... must know something besides the piano and the use of the globes and calisthenics. Her education must be less effeminate and inore feminine.

I am prepared to see the notion utterly ridiculed that a wife may supply to her

husband what he has failed to obtain by early training; even though most people acknowledge that there was something noble in Steele's description of a lady whom to love was a liberal education. But I shall adhere to my opinion that the women who are so vociferous and persistent in their hysteric cries to heaven and earth for a career would be far wiser if they qualified themselves to be useful wives. Here, I say, O shrilly eloquent ladies, there is a noble career for you; you may civilise the most opulent class of Englishmen ; you may turn city men into merchant princes. Is this not a worthy object of ambition? The best of us will find that he has something to learn from his wife . . . that there are subtler faculties in her nature enabling her to guide him in circumstances whereby he is himself perplexed.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy :

and there are also more depths in a woman's

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