We do not object to woman’s sharing in the toil of the store, the shop, or the factory.  Better this than idleness and want; yet there is a reason for pondering the question whether woman is wise in trying to displace man for her own advantage.  If any one must be idle, let it be woman, and not man.  It has been well said, “There are in Massachusetts over seventy thousand more females than males, and probably twice that number in the State of New York.  It is an unnatural condition of things.  At the West the number of men greatly preponderates.”

“Our young men go off early in life, leaving fathers, mothers, and sisters behind them.  The prospect for their sisters to marry, then, is lessened by every emigration.”  Now, what shall be done in behalf of these thousands of virtuous, educated, and noble girls?  The cry is, make them into clerks, and bookkeepers, and bankers, and give them all the employments of men.  Think it over.  Suppose now we make these girls into clerks in stores and counting-rooms, say ten thousand in Massachusetts, and twenty thousand in New York—­don’t we displace so many young men; drive them off to the West; prevent so many new families from being established here; take away thirty thousand chances of marriage from these females, and enhance the evil we are trying to remedy?

Is it a blessing to woman to lessen her opportunities of marriage?

Again, a woman can be idle, and not be lost.  Whereas man, if left unemployed, runs to mischief, if not to crime.

The history of those manufacturing districts in England, so eloquently described by Charlotte Elizabeth, where woman is preferred because of the cheapness and skill of her labor, proves this position correct.  The husband lives in idleness, and has the care of the house.  The result is, that comfort and neatness are at an end.  The children are reared in crime, in indolence; the men pass their time in drinking and in gambling, prostitution abounds, and the health of the community, socially, physically, mentally, and morally, is destroyed.

On the other hand, enter one of those manufacturing towns where the skilled labor of man is rewarded, and where women keep the house with thrift and care, and you behold order, virtue, and prosperity.  This is not poetry.  It is fact.  It proves that God’s laws must be heeded and obeyed.  “Marriage,” said Gail Hamilton, “is a friendship of the sexes so profound, so comprehensive, that it includes the whole being.  The inflow of the divine life,

  “‘Bright effluence of bright essence increate,’

“blends the man nature and the woman nature into an absolute oneness, which shapes itself ever thereafter into the only perfect symmetry.  Thus alone comes humanity in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.  Thus marriage forever tends to its own annihilation,—­not the annihilation of a stream swallowed up in desert sands, but of a river broadening to the boundless sea.  The more perfect its substance, the more yielding its form.  As it gathers power it diminishes pomp, till, by a pathway which the vulture’s eye hath not seen and never can see, marriage itself leads to the land where they neither marry nor are given in marriage.