e a few brief years more gay and brilliant! I
have known many instances of domestic ruin and discord produced by
this mistaken indulgence of mothers. _I never knew but one, where
the victim had moral courage enough to change all her early habits._
She was a young, pretty, and very amiable girl; but brought up to be
perfectly useless; a rag baby would, to all intents and purposes,
have been as efficient a partner. She married a young lawyer, without
property, but with good and increasing practice. She meant to be a
good wife, but she did not know how. Her wastefulness involved him in
debt. He did not reproach, though he tried to convince and instruct
her. She loved him; and weeping replied, 'I try to do the best I can;
but when I lived at home, mother always took care of everything.'
Finally, poverty came upon him 'like an armed man;' and he went into
a remote town in the Western States to teach a school. His wife folded
her hands, and cried; while he, weary and discouraged, actually came
home from school to cook his own supper. At last, his patience, and
her real love for him, impelled her to exertion. She promised to
learn to be useful, if he would teach her. And she did learn! And the
change in her habits gradually wrought such a change in her husband's
fortune, that she might bring her daughters up in idleness, had not
experience taught her that economy, like grammar, is a very hard and
tiresome study, after we are twenty years old.

Perhaps some will think the evils of which I have been speaking are
confined principally to the rich; but I am convinced they extend to
all classes of people. All manual employment is considered degrading;
and those who are compelled to do it, try to conceal it. A few years
since, very respectable young men at our colleges, cut their own wood,
and blacked their own shoes. Now, how few, even of the sons of plain
farmers and industrious mechanics, have moral courage enough to do
without a servant; yet when they leave college, and come out into the
battle of life, they _must_ do without servants; and in these times
it will be fortunate if one half of them get what is called 'a decent
living,' even by rigid economy and patient toil. Yet I would not that
servile and laborious employment should be forced upon the young.
I would merely have each one educated according to his probable
situation in life; and be taught that whatever is his duty, is
honorable; and that no merely external circumstan