said Sir Philip Sidney, “is the way to lose that which we fear to lose.”  Readers of the Bronte novels will remember the disgust of the English pupils and teachers in French schools at the constant espionage around them; and I have more than once heard young girls who had been trained at such institutions say that it was a wonder if they had any truthfulness left, so invariable was the assumption that it was the nature of young girls to lie.  I cannot imagine anything less likely to create upright and noble character, in man or woman, than the systematic application of the “European plan.”

And that it produces just the results that might be feared, the whole tone of European literature proves.  Foreigners, no doubt, do habitual injustice to the morality of French households; but it is impossible that fiction can utterly misrepresent the community which produces and reads it.  When one thinks of the utter lightness of tone with which breaches, both of truth and chastity, are treated even in the better class of French novels and plays, it seems absurd to deny the correctness of the picture.  Besides, it is not merely a question of plays and novels.  Consider, for instance, the contempt with which Taine treats Thackeray for representing the mother of Pendennis as suffering agonies when she thinks that her son has seduced a young girl, a social inferior.  Thackeray is not really considered a model of elevated tone, as to such matters, among English writers; but the Frenchman is simply amazed that the Englishman should describe even the saintliest of mothers as attaching so much weight to such a small affair.

An able newspaper writer, quoted with apparent approval by the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” praises the supposed foreign method for the “habit of dependence and deference” that it produces; and because it gives to a young man a wife whose “habit of deference is established.”  But it must be remembered, that, where this theory is established, the habit of deference is logically carried much farther than mere conjugal convenience would take it.  Its natural outcome is the authority of the priest, not of the husband.  That domination of the women of France by the priesthood which forms even now the chief peril of the republic—­which is the strength of legitimism and imperialism and all other conspiracies against the liberty of the French people—­is only the visible and inevitable result of this dangerous docility.

One thing is certain, that the best preparation for freedom is freedom; and that no young girls are so poorly prepared for American life as those whose early years are passed in Europe.  Some of the worst imprudences, the most unmaidenly and offensive actions, that I have ever heard of in decent society, have been on the part of young women educated abroad, who have been launched into American life without its early training,—­have been treated as children until they suddenly awakened to the freedom of women.  On the other hand, I remember with pleasure, that a cultivated French mother, whose daughter’s fine qualities were the best seal of her motherhood, once told me that the models she had chosen in her daughter’s training were certain families of American young ladies, of whom she had, through peculiar circumstances, seen much in Paris.