Next, I ask you to note carefully the expression and figures of the young girls whom you may chance to meet in your walks, or whom you may observe at a concert or in the ball-room.  You will see many very charming faces, the like of which the world cannot match—­figures somewhat too spare of flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a marvellous littleness of hand and foot.  But look further, and especially among New England young girls:  you will be struck with a certain hardness of line in form and feature which should not be seen between thirteen and eighteen, at least; and if you have an eye which rejoices in the tints of health, you will too often miss them on the cheeks we are now so daringly criticising.  I do not want to do more than is needed of this ungracious talk:  suffice it to say that multitudes of our young girls are merely pretty to look at, or not that; that their destiny is the shawl and the sofa, neuralgia, weak backs, and the varied forms of hysteria,—­that domestic demon which has produced untold discomfort in many a household, and, I am almost ready to say, as much unhappiness as the husband’s dram.  My phrase may seem outrageously strong, but only the doctor knows what one of these self-made invalids can do to make a household wretched.  Mrs. Gradgrind is, in fiction, the only successful portrait of this type of misery, of the woman who wears out and destroys generations of nursing relatives, and who, as Wendell Holmes has said, is like a vampire, sucking slowly the blood of every healthy, helpful creature within reach of her demands.

If any reader doubts my statement as to the physical failure of our city-bred women to fulfil all the natural functions of mothers, let him contrast the power of the recently imported Irish or Germans to nurse their babies a full term or longer, with that of the native women even of our mechanic classes.  It is difficult to get at full statistics as to those a higher social degree, but I suspect that not over one-half are competent to nurse their children a full year without themselves suffering gravely.  I ought to add that our women, unlike ladies abroad, are usually anxious to nurse their own children, and merely cannot.  The numerous artificial infant foods now for sale singularly prove the truth of this latter statement.  Many physicians, with whom I have talked of this matter, believe that I do not overstate the evil; others think that two-thirds may be found reliable as nurses; while the rural doctors, who have replied to my queries, state that only from one-tenth to three-tenths of farmers’ wives are unequal to this natural demand.  There is indeed little doubt that the mass of our women possess that peculiar nervous organization which is associated with great excitability, and, unfortunately, with less physical vigor than is to be found, for example, in the sturdy English dames at whom Hawthorne sneered so bitterly.  And what are the causes to which these peculiarities are to be laid?  There are