as in 1846, it is because women know more of business methods,
and are more competent to the management of money than they knew fifty
years ago, and some husbands, appreciating the change for the better,
are willing to commit funds to their keeping. The disposition of
fathers, brothers and husbands to regard the feminine portion of their
families as lovely dead weights, was justified in a degree by the
Lauras and Matildas, who clung like wet cotton-wool to the limbs of
their natural protectors. Dependence was reckoned among womanly
graces, and insisted upon as such in _Letters to Young Ladies, The
Young Wife's Manual, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters_, and other
valuable contributions to the family library of half a century ago.
Julia, as betrothed, assured wooing Adolphus that absolute dependence,
even for the bread she should eat, and breath she should draw, would
be delight and privilege. Julia, as wife, fretted and plained and
shook her "golden chains inlaid with down," when married Adolphus took
her at her word.

It is surprising that both parties were so slow in finding out how
false is the theory and how injurious the practice of the
cling-and-twine-and-hang-upon school.

From my window as I write I see an object lesson that pertinently
illustrates the actual state of affairs in many a home. At the root
of a stately cedar, sprang up, twenty years ago, a shoot of that most
hardy and beautiful of native creepers, the wild woodbine or American
ivy. It crept steadily upward, laying hold of branch and twig, casting
out, first, tendrils, then ropes, to make sure its hold--a thing of
beauty all summer, a coat of many colors in autumn, until it reached
the top of the tree. To-day, the only vestige of cedar-individuality
that remains to sight, is in the trunk, the bare branches, stripped of
all slight twigs, and at the extremity of one of these, a few tufts of
evergreen verdure, that proclaim "This was a tree."

In the novels and poems that set forth the eternal fitness of the
cling-twine-and-depend school, the vine is always feminine, the oak
(or cedar?) masculine. Not one that I know of depicts the gradual
strangling of the independent tree by the depending parasite.

Leaving the object-lesson to do its part, let us reason together
calmly upon this vexed subject. When a man solemnly, in the sight of
Heaven and human witnesses, endows his wife at the altar with his
worldly goods, it is either a deed of gift, or an