o anything for
herself or her children, and dependent upon the charity of her dead
husband's friends--and perhaps the wise thought and tender care of a
faithful servant, whose practical education was complete in the stern
school of necessity--for food, clothing, and shelter. They have been
only half-educated, and it seems as if the authority which has refused
in the past to provide them with the power for their own maintenance,
ought to recognize their right to be supported; as much as it does
recognize the duty of supporting others, for whose education it has
failed properly to care in their youth, in jails, penitentiaries, and
prisons.

As to the effect of the want of education and culture upon what are
known as the most characteristic womanly qualities, whether physical or
mental, no better illustration can be furnished than that of the women
among the Arkansas refugees, who during the war came crowding for
protection into Missouri. They had not dwelt in a frigid and contracting
climate; they had not been physically overworked, and they had not been
co-educated, for they had not been educated at all, either physically,
intellectually, or morally. Should we not have expected to find in these
children of nature, these women who had spent their lives in idleness,
undisturbed by any brain-work, at least, finely developed forms? But
what did we find in the quarters assigned them? Without a single
exception, they were tall, thin, and angular in face and form, while the
masculine loudness, harshness, and depth of their voices, and the
masculine expression of features and movement, made us involuntarily
recoil from them as if they were something monstrous, in being neither
man nor woman. The animal nature, informed only in a small degree by the
spiritual, inevitably descends through lower forms, and when we find it
deprived entirely of spiritual guidance, we find a something lower than
the dog that is grateful for our kindness, or the horse that whinnies as
he hears our step on the gravel-walk; for we find the idiot.

But meantime, while the child is passing through all these stages of
mental development, as ordained by the Creator, the definite school-work
is intrusted to the hands of professional teachers. American parents
throw this responsibility entirely off from their own shoulders when
they send their girls to school, with somewhat the same feeling of
relief as that with which they lead their family physician to the