ring districts and the dull brains of the agricultural
counties, should teach us a lesson as to the wisdom of keeping
apart state and national government.

"Before we can decide the just grounds for divorce, we must get a
clear idea of what constitutes marriage. In a true relation the
chief object is the loving companionship of man and woman, their
capacity for mutual help and happiness and for the development of
all that is noblest in each other. The second object is the
building up a home and family, a place of rest, peace, security, in
which child-life can bud and blossom like flowers in the sunshine.

"The first step toward making the ideal the real, is to educate our
sons and daughters into the most exalted ideas of the sacredness of
married life and the responsibilities of parenthood. I would have
them give, at least, as much thought to the creation of an immortal
being as the artist gives to his landscape or statue. Watch him in
his hours of solitude, communing with great Nature for days and
weeks in all her changing moods, and when at last his dream of
beauty is realized and takes a clearly defined form, behold how
patiently he works through long months and years on sky and lake,
on tree and flower; and when complete, it represents to him more
love and life, more hope and ambition, than the living child at his
side, to whose conception and antenatal development not one soulful
thought was ever given. To this impressible period of human life,
few parents give any thought; yet here we must begin to cultivate
virtues that can alone redeem the world.

"The contradictory views in which woman is represented are as
pitiful as varied. While the Magnificat to the Virgin is chanted in
all our cathedrals round the globe on each returning Sabbath day,
and her motherhood extolled by her worshipers, maternity for the
rest of womankind is referred to as a weakness, a disability, a
curse, an evidence of woman's divinely ordained subjection. Yet
surely the real woman should have some points of resemblance in
character and position with the ideal one, whom poets, novelists,
and artists portray.

"It is folly to talk of the sacredness of marriage and maternity,
while the wife is practically regarded as an inferior, a subject, a
slave. Having decided t