mselves, and that, too,
after having, through the false notions of their parents, wasted the
years in which they ought to have learned how successfully to maintain
themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and
outrage of that father and mother who pass their daughters into
womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood.
Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of,
but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of
which I could make a livelihood." You say you have a fortune to leave
them. Oh, man and woman, have you not learned that like vultures, like
hawks, like eagles, riches have wings and fly away? Though you should
be successful in leaving a competency behind you, the trickery of
executors may swamp it in a night? or some officials in our churches
may get up a mining company and induce your orphans to put their money
into a hole in Colorado, and if by the most skillful machinery the
sunken money can not be brought up again, prove to them, that it was
eternally decreed that that was the way they were to lose it, and that
it went in the most orthodox and heavenly style. Oh, the damnable
schemes that professed Christians will engage in until God puts His
fingers into the collar of the hypocrite's robe and strips it clear
down to the bottom! You have no right, because you are well off, to
conclude that your children are going to be as well off. A man died
leaving a large fortune. His son fell dead in a Philadelphia
grog-shop. His old comrades came in and said as they bent over his
corpse: "What is the matter with you, Boggsey?" The surgeon standing
over him said: "Hush ye! He is dead!" "Oh, he is dead," they said.
"Come, boys; let us go and take a drink in memory of poor Boggsey!"
Have you nothing better than money to leave your children? If you have
not, but send your daughters into the world with empty brain and
unskilled hand, you are guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide,
infanticide.

There are women toiling in our cities for two and three dollars per
week who were the daughters of merchant princes. These suffering ones
now would be glad to have the crumbs that once fell from their
fathers' table. That worn-out, broken shoe that she wears is the
lineal descendant of the twelve-dollar gaiters in which her mother
walked; and that torn and faded calico had ancestry of magnificent
brocade that swept Broadway clean without any exp