c institutions, and
impregnated with aristocratic ideas; and women among us are constantly
aspiring to foreign and aristocratic modes of life rather than to those
of native, republican simplicity. How many women are there, think you,
that would not go in for aristocracy and aristocratic prerogatives, if
they were only sure that they themselves should be of the privileged
class? To be 'My Lady Duchess,' and to have a right by that simple title
to the prostrate deference of all the lower orders! How many would have
firmness to vote against such an establishment merely because it was bad
for society? Tell the fair Mrs. Feathercap, 'In order that you may be a
duchess, and have everything a paradise of elegance and luxury around
you and your children, a hundred poor families must have no chance for
anything better than black bread and muddy water all their lives, a
hundred poor men must work all their lives on such wages that a
fortnight's sickness will send their families to the almshouse, and that
no amount of honesty and forethought can lay up any provision for old
age'"--

"Come now, Sir," said Jennie, "don't tell me that there any girls or
women so mean and selfish as to want aristocracy or rank so purchased!
You are too bad, Mr. Theophilus!"

"Perhaps they might not, were it stated in just these terms; yet I
think, if the question of the establishment of an order of aristocracy
among us were put to vote, we should find more women than men who would
go for it; and they would flout at the consequences to society with the
lively wit and the musical laugh which make feminine selfishness so
genteel and agreeable.

"No! It is a fact, that, in America, the women, in the wealthy classes,
are like the noblemen of aristocracies, and the men are the workers. And
in all this outcry that has been raised about women's wages being
inferior to those of men there is one thing overlooked,--and that is,
that women's work is generally inferior to that of men, because in every
rank they are the pets of society, and are excused from the laborious
drill and training by which men are fitted for their callings. Our fair
friends come in generally by some royal road to knowledge, which saves
them the dire necessity of real work,--a sort of feminine
hop-skip-and-jump into science or mechanical skill,--nothing like the
uncompromising hard labor to which the boy is put who would be a
mechanic or farmer, a lawyer or physician.

"I admit freely