cked and cruel. She may stand
before the world as the personification of refinement and delicacy
and elegance, but she is really no better than her substitute; and she
has no right to expect that her children will be better. In some
favorable cases there may come a redeeming power in future years, but
in the main they will drift downward to their first moral impressions;
and when they have become bad and unhappy men and women, they will not
scruple to say, "From our mother cometh our misery." These are hard
truths, yet one-half has not been told. For if it were not for the
abounding number of good mothers, both rich and poor, this class of
women would undermine all virtue, and everything lovely and of good
report.

There was once an idea that mothers were the antiseptic quality in
society, that they preserved its moral tone, by insisting that the
language used and the subjects discussed before them should be such as
were suitable for virtuous women. But there is one kind of bad mother
to whom questionable subjects seem highly suitable. She discusses them
without reserve in the presence of her daughters, and she makes her
drawing-room the forum for women with queer domestic views, for
"Physical Culture" women, and such-like characters. The things our
grandmothers went down to their graves without knowing she talks about
in unmistakable terms before unmarried girls. A certain mother who
boldly defended her opinion that "girls should not be kept ignorant as
a means for keeping them innocent," permitted her own daughter to be
present during all the unsavory scandal of Vanity Fair. The child
learned to watch with interest the doings of women of many seasons,
and to listen with composure to very questionable stories. Before she
was twelve years old she had become suspicious of the conduct of every
woman, and when her teacher one day asked her, "Who was Moses?" she
answered promptly, "The son of Pharoah's daughter." "Not the son,"
corrected the teacher, "the adopted son. Pharoah's daughter found him
in the river Nile." "_So_ she said," replied this premature
woman,--suspicions of women's actions and a ready assumption of the
very worst motives for them, being the lessons she had deduced from
knowledge imparted before mind and experience were capable of
receiving it.

It is often said that "ignorance is not innocence." True, but neither
is knowledge innocence; it is most frequently the first step of
guiltiness. What good can