ngled. To the class of girls which had been her especial charge she
made a farewell address whose impressive sentences must have been long
remembered. Here are some of them:--

"I reminded them of the ignorance in which some of them had been found,
and showed them how all my efforts had necessarily been directed to
stimulating their minds, leaving undone much which, under other
circumstances, would have been deemed indispensable. I thanked them for
the moral beauty of their conduct, bore witness that an appeal to
conscience had never failed, and told them of my happiness in having the
faith thus confirmed that young persons can be best guided by addressing
their highest nature. I assured them of my true friendship, proved by my
never having cajoled or caressed them into good. All my influence over
them was rooted in reality; I had never softened nor palliated their
faults. I had appealed, not to their weakness, but to their strength. I
had offered to them always the loftiest motives, and had made every
other end subservient to that of spiritual growth. With a heart-felt
blessing I dismissed them."

* * * * *

In those days appeared Miss Martineau's book on America, of which we may
say that its sharply critical tone stirred the national consciousness,
and brought freshly into consideration the question of negro slavery,
the discussion of which had been by common consent banished from "good"
society in the United States. Miss Martineau dared to reprobate this
institution in uncompromising language, and, while showing much
appreciation of the natural beauties of the country, was generally
thought to have done injustice to its moral and social characteristics.

While Margaret regarded with indignation the angry abuse with which her
friend's book was greeted on this side of the Atlantic, she felt obliged
to express to her the disappointment which she herself had felt on
reading it. She acknowledges that the work has been "garbled,
misrepresented, scandalously ill-treated." Yet she speaks of herself as
one of those who, seeing in the book "a degree of presumptuousness,
irreverence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, and ultraism on many
points which they did not expect, lament the haste in which you have
written, and the injustice which you have consequently done to so
important a task, and to your own powers of being and doing."

Among other grievances, Margaret especially felt the manner in