very serious
matter that they were not respectable or lovable people, for they
constitute one-half of the ancestry of your children. Their most
undesirable characteristics may, perchance, be the endowment of your
sons and daughters, and your heart ache, or even break, over the
habits, or, it may be, criminality, which may disgrace your home
through the paternal inheritance that you chose for them. Viewed in
this light, marriage becomes a most serious matter. It is unfortunate
that girls generally have the idea that it is not modest to think of
marriage further than the ceremony. Of the responsibilities and duties
they are not only ignorant, but think it ladylike to remain
uninformed until experience teaches them, and that teaching is often
accompanied by heart-breaking sorrow. If you should make inquiry you
would discover that a large proportion of mothers have buried their
firstborn children, and should you ask them why, they would in all
probability say, almost without exception, that it was because they
did not know how to give them a dower of health, or how to care for
their physical needs.

Again, investigation would show you that children go astray, become
wild, dissipated, or even criminal, because parents have not known how
to train them, how to keep their confidence, how wisely to guide them
in ways of righteousness.

We all believe it very important that mothers should know how to
direct and govern their children, and yet we do not train the future
mothers for this important office. We teach girls how to sew or cook,
how to embroider and play the piano. We do not expect them to know,
without instruction, how to mingle the ingredients for a cake or
pudding, but we imagine that they will know by intuition how to secure
the best results in the mingling of heterogeneous compounds in the
formation of the characteristics of a human being.

When we speak of the mother's privilege, we think of the actual
mother, whose privilege is to care for and guide her real children.
But the mother's privilege in fact begins in her own childhood, when
by her habits of life and thought she is deciding her own character,
and at the same time creating, in great degree, the talents and
tendencies of her possible children. It is her privilege to secure a
measure of physical vigor for her descendants by her care of her own
health in her very girlhood. She can endow them with mental power by
not frittering away her own powers of min