of self-support, I can hardly conceive of an instance where it can be to the mother of young children anything but a disaster.  As we all know, this calamity often occurs; I have seen it among the factory operatives at the North, and among the negro women in the cotton-fields at the South:  in both cases it is a tragedy, and the bodies and brains of mother and children alike suffer.  That the mother should bear and tend and nurture, while the father supports and protects,—­this is the true division.

Does this bear in any way upon suffrage?  Not at all.  The mother can inform herself upon public questions in the intervals of her cares, as the father among his; and the baby in the cradle is a perpetual appeal to her, as to him, that the institutions under which that baby dwells may be kept pure.  One of the most devoted young mothers I ever knew—­the younger sister of Margaret Fuller Ossoli—­made it a rule, no matter how much her children absorbed her, to read books or newspapers for an hour every day; in order, she said, that she should be more to them than a mere source of physical nurture, and that her mind should be kept fresh and alive for them.  But to demand in addition that such a mother should earn money for them is to ask too much; and there is many a tombstone in New England, which, if it told the truth, would tell what comes of such an effort.

THOROUGH

“The hopeless defect of women in all practical matters,” said a shrewd merchant the other day, “is that it is impossible to make them thorough.”  It was a shallow remark, and so I told him.  Women are thorough in the things which they have been expected to regard as their sphere,—­in their housekeeping and their dress and their social observances.  There is nothing more thorough on earth than the way housework is done in a genuine New England household.  There is an exquisite thoroughness in the way a milliner’s or a dressmaker’s work is done,—­a work such as clumsy man cannot rival, and can hardly estimate.  No general plans his campaigns or marshals his armies better than some women of society—­the late Mrs. Paran Stevens, for instance—­manage the circles of which they are the centre.  Day and night, winter and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year out, such a woman keeps open house for her gay world.  She has a perpetual series of guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she talks to them in three or four languages; at her entertainments she notes who is present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his soldiers; her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the army muster-rolls:  thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs.  People speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most untiring of campaigners.  Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles.  No matter:  the smiles are there, and so is the success.  I often wish that the reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society do theirs.