The home should not be considered merely as an eating and sleeping place; but as a place where self-respect may be preserved, and comfort secured, and domestic pleasures enjoyed.  Three-fourths of the petty vices which degrade society, and swell into crimes which disgrace it, would shrink before the influence of self-respect.  To be a place of happiness, exercising beneficial influences upon its members,—­and especially upon the children growing up within it,—­the home must be pervaded by the spirit of comfort, cleanliness, affection, and intelligence.  And in order to secure this, the presence of a well-ordered, industrious, and educated woman is indispensable.  So much depends upon the woman, that we might almost pronounce the happiness or unhappiness of the home to be woman’s work.  No nation can advance except through the improvement of the nation’s homes; and these can only be improved through the instrumentality of women.  They must know how to make homes comfortable; and before they can know, they must have been taught.

Women must, therefore, have sufficient training to fit them for their duties in real life.  Their education should be conducted throughout, with a view to their future position as wives, mothers, and housewives.  But amongst all classes, even the highest, the education of girls is rarely conducted with this object.  Amongst the working people, the girls are sent out to work; amongst the higher classes, they are sent out to learn a few flashy accomplishments; and men are left to pick from them, very often with little judgment, the future wives and mothers of England.

Men themselves attach little or no importance to the intelligence or industrial skill of women; and they only discover their value when they find their homes stupid and cheerless.  Men are caught by the glance of a bright eye, by a pair of cherry cheeks, by a handsome figure; and when they “fall in love,” as the phrase goes, they never bethink them of whether the “loved one” can mend a shirt or cook a pudding.  And yet the most sentimental of husbands must come down from his “ecstatics” so soon as the knot is tied; and then he soon enough finds out that the clever hands of a woman are worth far more than her bright glances; and if the shirt and pudding qualifications be absent, then woe to the unhappy man, and woe also to the unhappy woman!  If the substantial element of physical comfort be absent from the home, it soon becomes hateful; the wife, notwithstanding all her good looks, is neglected; and the public-house separates those whom the law and the Church have joined together.

Men are really desperately ignorant respecting the home department.  If they thought for a moment of its importance, they would not be so ready to rush into premature housekeeping.  Ignorant men select equally ignorant women for their wives; and these introduce into the world families of children, whom they are utterly incompetent to train as rational or domestic beings.  The home is no home, but a mere lodging, and often a very comfortless one.