The principle that underlies these extracts, and makes them ministrative of evil, is the principle that a woman can benefit her children by sacrificing herself.  It teaches, that pale, thin faces and feeble steps are excellent things in young mothers,—­provided they are gained by maternal duties.  We infer that it is meet, right, and the bounden duty of such to give up society, reading, riding, music, and become indifferent to dress, cultivation, recreation, to everything, in short, except taking care of the children.  It is all just as wrong as it can be.  It is wrong morally; it is wrong socially; wrong in principle, wrong in practice.  It is a blunder as well as a crime, for it works woe.  It is a wrong means to accomplish an end; and it does not accomplish the end, after all, but demolishes it.

On the contrary, the duty and dignity of a mother require that she should never subordinate herself to her children.  When she does so, she does it to their manifest injury and her own.  Of course, if illness or accident demand unusual care, she does well to grow thin and pale in bestowing unusual care.  But when a mother in the ordinary routine of life grows thin and pale, gives up riding, reading, and the amusements and occupations of life, there is a wrong somewhere, and her children shall reap the fruits of it.  The father and mother are the head of the family, the most comely and the most honorable part.  They cannot benefit their children by descending from their Heaven-appointed places, and becoming perpetual and exclusive feet and hands.  This is the great fault of American mothers.  They swamp themselves in a slough of self-sacrifice.  They are smothered in their own sweetness.  They dash into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate themselves.  They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous well, and are extinguished.

One hears much complaint of the direction and character of female education.  It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to sing operas, but not how to keep house,—­that they can conjugate Greek verbs, but cannot make bread,—­that they are good for pretty toying, but not for homely using.  Doubtless there is foundation for this remark, or it would never have been made.  But I have been in the East, and the West, and the North, and the South; I know that I have seen the best society, and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the worst; and I never met a woman whose superior education, whose piano, whose pencil, whose German, or French, or any school-accomplishments, or even whose novels, clashed with her domestic duties.  I have read of them in books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,—­not one.  I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental pabulum, leave undone things that ought to be done,—­rush to the assembly, the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin.  So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed in that direction.