care for their health.  The result, in the one case as in the other, is disease and distortion.  Nature will assert her rights over the beings she has made; and she avenges, by the production of deformity, all attempts to force or shackle her operations.  The golden globe could not check the expansive force of water; equally useless is it to attempt any check on the expansive force of mind,—­it will ooze out!  We ought long ago to have been convinced that the only power allowed to us is the power of direction.  If one-half the amount of effort expanded to useless endeavours to cramp and check, had been turned towards this channel, how different would be the results!  It is true that it is easier to check than to guide,—­to fetter than to restrain; and that to attempt to remove evil by the first-occurring remedy is a natural impulse.  But a pause should by made, lest in applying the remedy a worse evil be not engendered.  Distorted spines and “pale consumptions,” the result of the one mistake, are trifling evils, when compared with the moral evils resulting from the other.  For if, as is affirmed, no education can be good which does not bear upon future duties, how can that be wise which keeps love and its temptations, maternity and its responsibilities, out of view?  Who would believe that this love, so denounced, so guarded against, so carefully banished from the minds of young women, is the one principle on which their future happiness may be founded or wrecked?  It is sure to seek them, (most of them, at least,) like death in the fable, to find them unprepared,—­too often to leave them wretched.

Meanwhile, these exaggerated precautions in the education of one sex have been met by equally fatal negligence in the education of the other; and while to girls have been denied the very thoughts of love,—­even in its noblest and purest form,—­the most effeminate and corrupt productions of the heathen writers have been unhesitatingly laid open to boys; so that the two sexes, on whose respective notions of the passion depends the ennobling or the degrading of their race, meet on these terms:—­the men know nothing of love but what they have imbibed from an impure and polluted source; the women, nothing at all, or nothing but what they have clandestinely gathered from sources almost equally corrupt.  The deterioration of any feeling must follow from such injudicious training, more especially a feeling so susceptible as love of assuming such differing aspects.

Let no sober-minded person be startled at the deductions hence drawn, that it is foolish to banish all thoughts of love from the minds of the young.  Since it is certain that girls will think, though they may not read or speak, of love; and that no early care can preserve them from being exposed, at a later period, to its temptations, might it not be well to use here the directing, not the repressing power?  Since women will love, might it not be as well to teach them to love wisely?  Where is the wisdom of letting the combatant go unarmed into the field, in order to spare him the prospect of a combat?  Are not women made to love, and to be loved:  and does not their future destiny too often depend upon this passion?  And yet the conventual prejudice which banishes its name subsists still.