thou sayest, "I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst them asunder; I will go where no man claims me?” 16. Every bond of thy life is a debt; the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else. 17. In vain wilt thou wander over the earth; thou wilt be wandering forever away from the right. 18. Can man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace, or their father and mother. 19. Thou mayest choose to forsake thy duties, and choose not to have the sorrow they bring. But thou wilt go forth, and what wilt thou find? Sorrow without duty, bitter herbs, and no bread with them. 20. Thou talkest of substantial good! Are faithfulness, and love, and sweet grateful memories, no good? 21. Is it no good that we should keep our silent promises on which others build because they believe in our love and truth? 22. Is it good that we should harden our hearts against all the wants and hopes of those who have depended on us? 23. What good can belong to men who have such souls? To talk cleverly, perhaps, and find soft couches for themselves, and live and die with their base selves as their best companions. 24. The sanctity of oaths 25. 'Tis a compulsion of a higher sort, Whose fetters are the net invisible 26. Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off And knows no disappointment. 27. We can set a watch over our affections and our constancy, as we can over other treasures. 28. In the ports Of levity no refuge can be found, No shelter, for a spirit in distress. 29. A nation stands or falls with the sanctity of its domestic ties. THE SOCIAL OF MARRIAGE 30. The political law, since it cannot regulate vice, is to restrain it by using all means to root it out. 31. But if it suffer the weed to grow up to any pleasurable or contented height, upon what pretext soever, it fastens the root, it prunes and dresses vice, as if it were a good plant. 32. For what less indignity were this, than as if justice herself, the queen of virtues, descending from her sceptred royalty, instead of conquering, should compound and treat with sin, her eternal adversary and rebel, upon ignoble terms? 33. Sin can have no tenure by law at all, but is rather an eternal outlaw, and in hostility with law past all atonement; both as much allowing one another as day and night together in one hemisphere. 34. Or, if it be possible that sin with his darkness may come to composition, it cannot be without a foul eclipse and twilight to the law, whose brightness ought to surpass the noon. 35. Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source Of human offspring, sole propriety! 36. The Family is the heart's fatherland! Hold then the family sacred! Look upon it as one of the indestructible conditions of life, and reject every attempt made to undermine it! 37. Who will not love the family which whispers between the mother's kiss and the father's caress, the child's first lesson of citizenship? CHAPTER LIV. LET WOMAN LIVE OUT HER OWN LIFE 1. You bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their frivolity. SELF-REALI SATION DENIED TO 2. Give them the same advantages that you give their brothers; appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue in them: teach them also that courage and truth are the pillars of their being. 3. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of character is neither better nor worse than the male; 4. That women are meant neither to be men's guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows and their equals, so far as nature puts no bar to that equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls. 5. The model women of men make pleasant slaves, not true mates: they lack the worldly training to know themselves or to take a grasp of circumstances. 6. There is an exotic fostering of the senses for women, not the strengthening breath of vital common air. 7. Respect Woman! Seek in her not merely a com fort, but a force, an inspiration, the redoubling of your intellectual and moral faculties. Cancel from your mind every idea of superiority over woman. 8. Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a perennial legal inequality and injustice, have created that apparent intellectual inferiority which has been converted into an argument of continued oppression. 9. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness. 10. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. WOMEN SHALL REJOICE IN TIME TO COME 11. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. 12. Strength and honour are her clothing, and she shall rejoice in time to come. 13. The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free: 14. For she that out of Lethe scales with man The shining steps of Nature, shares with man His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal, Stays all the fair young planet in her hands15. If she be small, slight-natured, miserable, How shall men grow? 16. Let her make herself her own 17. For woman is not undevelop'd man, But diverse could we make her as the man, |