thoughtful minds because the drift of the times is against educating women for the home.  Of the women who are compelled to earn their own subsistence many prefer the factory and the store to the work in the family, and, as a result, there are large numbers of young women who cannot make a loaf of bread or cook a meal, who would not hesitate to become wives of working-men, who expect to find in them a helpmeet in building a home like that which blessed their childhood.  The result is dissatisfaction and recrimination, leaving the wife for the club, and turning from the joys of the home to the revel of jovial companions.

The same is true of the class of young ladies who know something of music, vocal and instrumental.  They can dance.  They have studied drawing sufficiently to be able to sketch a few flowers and figures.  Perhaps they can speak French and translate German.  They know in what position to sit, and how to move gracefully.  All very well these things in their places, and fitted to increase the charm of manner when the eyes are lighted up by the informing soul; not undeserving notice either in their influence upon man, when they are accompanied by something better, for, amid all the weighty cares of life, he is sometimes in the mood when such things do please; but sadly over-estimated when they are made the sole substance and end of a woman’s education.  They might nearly all be done by a being without a soul.  They do nothing to draw out the noble qualities of her deep womanly nature.  They leave her altogether unfitted for her peculiar mission of a wife and mother.

Now, there are times when a woman, despite her imperfect education, acquires after marriage the knowledge which fits her for the duties appertaining to wifehood.  But where nature yields to such training, the woman fails both in filling her sphere and in fulfilling her mission, and falls beneath her true position as the helpmeet of man.  How bitter his disappointment, who, having been smitten by these gewgaw attractions, and having put faith in the mother of the child that with this outward attraction she had corresponding qualifications to fill the home with helpful counsel and sustaining sympathy, when he comes to find that, instead of a wife, he has married a plaything, and that his children are being committed to the care of a helpless, unformed companion, rather than to the guidance of a true and noble wife.

A proper conception of woman’s mission as the helpmeet of man would tend greatly to her elevation.  A man who knows for what woman has been made, and what advantage he should look for from the woman whom he calls wife, will not select a mere toy as the partner of his life; and when woman properly recognizes her place, mothers will not be content to give their daughters, nor will daughters be ambitious, or even content to receive only such a training as fits them for amusing or pleasing man in his playful hours, but leaves them altogether unfit to be his companion under the weightier cares and graver concerns of life.