y sacred; here we see oaths violated, holy
confidences betrayed, and on the ruins of a too facile virtue innocence
sits in tears, doubting everything, because compelled to doubt the love
of a father for his child. The unfortunate girl is still innocent; she
may yet become a faithful wife, a tender mother, and, if the past is
mantled in clouds, the future is blue as the clear sky. Shall we not
find these tender tints in the gloomy pictures of loves which violate
the marriage law? In the one, the woman is the victim, in the other,
she is a criminal. What hope is there for the unfaithful wife? If God
pardons the fault, the most exemplary life cannot efface, here below,
its living consequences. If James I was the son of Rizzio, the crime of
Mary lasted as long as did her mournful though royal house, and the fall
of the Stuarts was the justice of God.

But in good faith, would the emancipation of girls set free such a host
of dangers?

It is very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be
deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of
girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition
of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about
seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and
mingling with this reliance the convenient maxims of the fashionable
world, she takes as her guide while under the control of those desires
which everything conspires to excite, her own deluding fancies, which
prove a guide all the more treacherous, because a young girl rarely ever
confides to another the secret thoughts of her first love.

If she were free, an education free from prejudices would arm her
against the love of the first comer. She would, like any one else, be
very much better able to meet dangers of which she knew, than perils
whose extent had been concealed from her. And, moreover, is it necessary
for a girl to be any the less under the watchful eye of her mother,
because she is mistress of her own actions? Are we to count as nothing
the modesty and the fears which nature has made so powerful in the
soul of a young girl, for the very purpose of preserving her from the
misfortune of submitting to a man who does not love her? Again, what
girl is there so thoughtless as not to discern, that the most immoral
man wishes his wife to be a woman of principle, as masters desire their
servants to be perfect; and that, therefore, her virtue