ng asleep regularly.

If parties for children and young people could be made fashionable under
the name of _matinees_, they might not have bad results; but as they are
at present carried on, they are an unmitigated evil, and one that is
sapping to a fearful degree the nervous force of our girls. What mother
would give her little girl a cup of arsenic, no matter how tearfully or
earnestly she might plead? The very idea of education lies in the
directing of the capricious and irrational instincts, the blind and
ignorant forces, into their proper channels, by the rational and
enlightened will of the educator. But if, instead of this, the unformed
will is made the guide, the very reverse of education is taking place.
It makes no difference to the physical forces, however, whether the
hours lost from sleep be lost at a party or at a lecture, a sermon, or
tableaux for the benefit of foreign missions. Nature makes no
distinctions of motive. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is
her motto. If one opposes himself to her laws, the offender, not she,
goes down; and as Sancho Panza very wisely remarks, "Whether the stone
hit the jug, or the jug the stone, it is bad for the jug."

It is remarked by all foreigners, that in America the children rule the
house. This is simply saying that we are, as a general rule, an
uneducated people; which is undoubtedly true. When we learn the immense
importance of sleep to the health of our girls, and when we know that
our rational convictions should lead them, and not their irrational
desires, us, we shall hear less about their breaking down in health as
they grow toward maturity. We shall see fewer pale faces and angular
forms; though they will probably never, while they live in this climate,
acquire the ruddy glow of the Englishwoman or the German, or the rounded
outlines of the nations of Southern Europe.

_Clothing._--With the external form of the dress as to cut, trimming, or
color, this essay has nothing to do. Unless a dress be cut so low in the
neck that it becomes an unhealthful exposure after taking off warmer
clothing, it in no wise concerns this branch of the subject. I wish to
speak only of the underclothing habitually worn by our girls, and its
mode of adjustment; these being, as I believe, the causes of much
exhaustion and disease.

If technical terms, uncomprehended by any class of readers, be used, it
is simply for the sake of brevity; and because, as Kant says,
"com