cts of which they have not learnt to see the advantage, and which
withdraw their men from them, and from the interests of the family.
But the consequence is that women's influence is often anything but
favourable to public virtue.

Women have, however, some share of influence in giving the tone to
public moralities since their sphere of action has been a little
widened, and since a considerable number of them have occupied
themselves practically in the promotion of objects reaching beyond
their own family and household. The influence of women counts for a
great deal in two of the most marked features of modern European
life--its aversion to war, and its addiction to philanthropy.
Excellent characteristics both; but unhappily, if the influence of
women is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these feelings in
general, in the particular applications the direction it gives to
them is at least as often mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic
department more particularly, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by
women are religious proselytism and charity. Religious proselytism at
home, is but another word for embittering of religious animosities:
abroad, it is usually a blind running at an object, without either
knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs--fatal to the religious object
itself as well as to all other desirable objects--which may be
produced by the means employed. As for charity, it is a matter in
which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the
ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete
war with one another: while the education given to women--an
education of the sentiments rather than of the understanding--and the
habit inculcated by their whole life, of looking to immediate effects
on persons, and not to remote effects on classes of persons--make
them both unable to see, and unwilling to admit, the ultimate evil
tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself
to their sympathetic feelings. The great and continually increasing
mass of unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which, taking the
care of people's lives out of their own hands, and relieving them
from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the very
foundations of the self-respect, self-help, and self-control which
are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of
social virtue--this waste of resources and of benevolent feelings in
doing harm