So, at the dawn of a career which promised nothing but glory and prosperity, surrounded by all the appliances of ease and pleasure, he was solicitous to teach his child to do and to endure.  He would have her accustomed to sleep alone, and to go about the house in the dark.  Her breakfast was of bread and milk.  He was resolute in exacting the less agreeable tasks, such as arithmetic.  He insisted upon regularity of hours.  Upon going away upon a journey he would leave written orders for her tutors, detailing the employments of each day; and, during his absence, a chief topic of his letters was the lessons of the children. Children,—­for, that his Theodosia might have the advantage of a companion in her studies, he adopted the little Natalie, a French child, whom he reared to womanhood in his house.  “The letters of our dear children,” he would write,

“are a feast.  To hear that they are employed, that no time is absolutely wasted, is the most flattering of anything that could be told me of them.  It insures their affection, or is the best evidence of it.  It insures in its consequences everything I am ambitious of in them.  Endeavor to preserve regularity of hours; it conduces exceedingly to industry.”

And his wife would answer: 

“I really believe, my dear, that few parents can boast of children whose minds are so prone to virtue.  I see the reward of our assiduity with inexpressible delight, with a gratitude few experience.  My Aaron, they have grateful hearts.”

Or thus:  “Theo [seven years old] ciphers from five in the morning until eight, and also the same hours in the evening.  This prevents our riding at those hours.”

When Theodosia was ten years old, Mary Wollstonecraft’s eloquent little book, “A Vindication of the Eights of Woman,” fell into Burr’s hands.  He was so powerfully struck by it that he sat up nearly all night reading it.  He showed it to all his friends.  “Is it owing to ignorance or prejudice,” he wrote, “that I have not yet met a single person who had discovered, or would allow the merit of this work?” The work, indeed, was fifty years in advance of the time; for it anticipated all that is rational in the opinions respecting the position and education of women which are now held by the ladies who are stigmatized as the Strong-minded, as well as by John Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other economists of the modern school.  It demanded fair play for the understanding of women.  It proclaimed the essential equality of the sexes.  It denounced the awful libertinism of that age, and showed that the-weakness, the ignorance, the vanity, and the seclusion of women prepared them to become the tool and minion of bad men’s lust.  It criticised ably the educational system of Rousseau, and, with still more severity, the popular works of bishops and priests, who chiefly strove to inculcate an abject submission to man as the rightful lord of the sex.  It demonstrated that the sole possibility of woman’s elevation to the rank of man’s equal and friend was in the cultivation of her mind, and in the thoughtful discharge of the duties of her lot.  It is a really noble and brave little book, undeserving of the oblivion into which it has fallen.  No intelligent woman, no wise parent with daughters to rear, could read it now without pleasure and advantage.