Woman in America: her work and her reward

WOMAN IN AMERICA.

WOMAI II AMERICA:

HER WORK AND HER REWARD.

MARIA J, MCINTOSH,

AUTHOR OF " CHARMS AND COUNTER-CHARMS," " TO SEEM AND
TO BE," ETC. ETC.

"The ancients looked towards the land of the setting sun as to a land of
promise, where the earth puts forth fruits for eternal life ; and surely the home
of the Hesperides must have features and beauty of its own, and a calling not
known to the old world."

F. BREMER.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 200 BROADWAY.

PHILADELPHIA :

GEO. 8. APPLETON, 104 CHESNUT-STREET.
M DCCC L.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850,
BY D. APPLETON & COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern
District of New York.

CONTENTS.

Page

CHAPTER L — NATURAL PRINCIPLES, AND THEIR APPLICATION TO

MORAL SUBJECTS 13

CHAPTER II. — WOMAN — HER OFFICES AND HER POWERS 21

CHAPTER III. — GOD IN HISTORY — THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 30

CHAPTER IV. — FEUDALISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 42

CHAPTER V. — SOCIAL LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES 55

CHAPTER VI. — SOCIAL EVILS* — WOMAN THETR REFORMER 62

CHAPTER VII. — CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION 82

CHAPTER VIII.— THE WEST 9t

CHAPTER IX. — THE SOUTH 110

CHAPTER X. — THE NORTH-EASTERN AND MIDDLE STATES — CON-
CLUSION 127

1225876

INTRODUCTION.

HE who undertakes to mark the movements of
a multitude, who would decide whither their steps
tend, and judge their deviations from the right
path, must stand above them, that he may overlook
their course ; and some such elevation may seem
to be claimed by her who seeks to awaken the at-
tention of her countrywomen to the mistakes by
which, as she believes, their social progress is im-
peded, or misdirected. The only advantage over
those whom she addresses claimed by the author
of the following pages, however, is opportunity for
more extended observation of the varied forms of
social life in her own land, than has been enjoyed
by many of her sex.

Bound to the South — the land of her birth, and
the home of her childhood and youth — by ties
which no time can sever, ties knit when feeling
was strongest and association most vivid, her ma-

12

turer and more reflective years have been -passed
in the Northern States ; and here kind hearts have
been opened to her, and friendly hands have been
extended to draw her into the sanctuary of their
homes, and permit her to become a pleased witness
of the "holy revealings" proceeding from those
innermost shrines of life. Nor has her observation
been confined to one class, in these her different
abodes. She has been permitted to take her views
of life, now from the position occupied by those
who claim the "privilege" of idleness, and now
from that of those whom a friendly necessity has
constrained to yield obedience to the benign law
of labor.

Thus, her sympathies with all have been culti-
vated ; and if somewhat of dogmatism be discover-
able in this little volume, it will, she hopes, be
pardoned in one who can say — "We speak that
we know, and testify that we have seen."

NBTW YORK, Jan. IZth, 1850.

WOMAN IN AMERICA:

HER WORK AND HER REWARD.

CHAPTER I,

NATURAL PRINCIPLES, AND THEIR APPLICATION TO MORAL
SUBJECTS.

HE who acknowledges God in the creation of our
earth, can need no labored argument to prove that He
preserves it in being, and rules over its destinies. Were
all things around us fixed and changeless in their char-
acter, we might be in danger of forgetting, or overlook-
ing the present Deity ; but our existence passes amidst
ever varying scenes. Death and Life are unceasingly
busy around us — the one resolving all things into their
original elements, the other evoking from those elements
new forms of grace and beauty. Each Spring, the
Spirit of God moves over the face of the dead earth,
quickens it into new life, decks it with primeval beauty,
and awakens, from the silence in which stern winter had
bound them, all the sweet harmonies of nature — the
' 2

14 WOMAN IN AMEKICA I

ripple of the brook — the dash of the wave — the low
hum of the bee — the cheerful chirp of the insect — " the
charm of earliest birds,"

" That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,"
and those " vernal airs" which,

" Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
" The trembling leaves."

To the freshness of spring succeeds the luxuriance of
Summer, and the maturer loveliness of Autumn, whose
first gorgeous coloring,

" The gilded halo hovering round decay,"

fades, even as we gaze, into soberer hues, preparing us
for the last great change effected by Winter, which by
its first icy touch hushes the bounding pulse of life in
" Nature's full, free heart," and stripping the earth of
all her bright array, wraps her in a snowy shroud, and
leaves her to rest in the solemn beauty of the grave.

Thus are we ever reminded in the natural world of the
presence of the creating and guiding Spirit ; and if, in the
moral world, that presence is, from the nature of things,
less obvious to the senses, are not the arguments for
it more conclusive to the reason? Are not sentient
and intelligent beings of more value than the fairest

HEE WOEK AND HEE EETVAED. 15

forms which no spirit animates ? Can the Infinitely Wise
thus paint the flower, provide for the thirsting earth all
the soft influences of sun and shower, kindle the lights
that give glory to the solemn night, and deck the blue
arch of heaven with the light gauzy clouds that veil the
mid-day sun, or the gorgeous drapery of gold and crim-
son behind which he sinks to rest ; — shall He furnish
the lower orders of the animal creation with an unerring
guide whereby they may secure to themselves the high-
est good of which they are capable, and avoid all those
evils that threaten then* brief existence ; — and shall man,
the being created in His own image, gifted with senses
the most acute and intellect the most far-reaching, with
a physical organization through which he has become
heir to a thousand ills, and a spirit whose longings are
foreshadowings of that immortality for which a Divine
revelation has declared him destined — shall he be nature's
only orphan, finding in the Universal Father but a con-
scientious Ruler, who, having arranged the mechanism
of His government on just and sound principles, leaves
him, with unpitying eye and unhelping hand, to work
out his destiny for time and for eternity ? Not thus did
He teach who questioned, " Shall He so clothe the grass
of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into

16 WOMAN IN AMEEICA:

the oven, and shall He not much more clothe you, O
ye of little faith ?"

This is a subject on which we believe there is more
inconsideration that needs to be aroused to thought, and
more insensibility that requires to be quickened into
feeling, than infidelity to be convinced. We have there-
fore rather sought to present a vivid picture of the
truth, than to construct an argument for its defence.
But if it be admitted that the Great Spirit who presides
over the natural phenomena of our world, arranges also
its moral and social influences, will it not follow that
those principles which are invariably manifested in the
one will reappear in the other? If it be acknowledged
that man, with his powers of thought and feeling and
action, with his ever- extending capacities and limitless
desires, is not less cared for by Him than the lily of the
field which He clothes with such delicate beauty, or the
bird which He sustains in the air, may we not believe that
at least equal excellence of design and carefulness of
adjustment will be discoverable to an earnestly attentive
eye in those arrangements of His Providence by which
the character and the destiny of the one are so greatly
influenced, as hi those which give its charm to the brief
existence of the other ?

HER TVOEK AND HEE EETVAED. 17

Now let us glance at some of those principles which
are most frequently discoverable in the natural world.
The first of these that presents itself to our observation
is, that nothing is created in vain — that from the sun,
which is the most glorious natural type of Hun whose
smile is

" the life and light
Of all this wondrous world we see,"

to the smallest animalcule that sports in its beams, un-
detected save by the aid of the most powerful micro-
scope, each has been created for a specific object, for the
accomplishment of which it is carefully fitted. So far
as our limited faculties permit us to appreciate the facts
of nature, existence is pleasurable to each creature, yet
none seems to have been created only to enjoy. In his
remarks on Dr. Mantell's interesting work on animal-
cules, Chambers says : " Nor is this a study the result
of which is merely amusement and wonder ; for, like the
minute parasitic vegetation whose growth absorbs the
elements of decay, and which occasionally create such
havoc among human food and engender disease and
death, the myriad animalcules in nature may execute
similar missions, sometimes repressing putridity, at others
2*

18 WOMAN IN AMEEICA:

becoming the sources of the most loathsome and fatal
diseases."

And if these are not exempt from their tasks —
if they have an appointed office to fulfil in the labor-
atory of the universe, can creatures more nobly en-
dowed be intended only as idle consumers of the gifts
of God?

Another principle, which has been so often demon-
strated that we are scarcely permitted to doubt its
universality, is, that in those objects which seem to the
superficial eye formed but to charm, and to give, by their
beauty and their grace, dim intimations of fairer and
brighter scenes, there dwells some ulterior power, ren-
dering them useful as well as ornamental. ' He who goes
forth at the soft hour " when daylight dies," and watches
the bright stars, as they come out one by one in the deep
serene of night, may well exclaim — " How beautiful !"
But is this all? Can any one now believe that these
were created but to adorn this fair abode of man ? Has
not science revealed to us in them floods of being, before
the mighty imagination of which our weak minds sink
appalled ? The clouds which float so gracefully across
the blue vault of heaven, " deck the gorgeous west at
even" with colors that defy the painter's art, or, gather-

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 19

ing in stormy grandeur around the mountain's head, add
new sublimity to nature, bear in their bosom the fertil-
izing shower. And even in the flower which rears its
graceful head in our path, and sheds its perfume on the
air we breathe, we are often taught to recognise, and
may always suspect, higher uses than these.

A third principle in the arrangements of the natural
world, and the last which we shall at present notice, is
that beautiful system of adaptation by which each object
in creation finds itself in that position for which its pe-
culiar organization has fitted it, and discovers in its offices
the exact correlatives of its powers.

From the application of these natural principles to the
moral world, it will follow, first, that every distinct class
of moral and intellectual beings should have — that is,
was designed to have — a specific object in the exercise of
its powers, in its moral and intellectual life, apart from
the pleasure of that exercise ; secondly, that with none
can this object be merely to give a new charm to the
existence of others, to add beauty to the scenes of which
they make a part, — that this is, in truth, only a necessary
and unconscious result of their faithful performance of
their true and allotted work ; and, lastly, that this work
will bear such a relation to the powers and position of

20 WOMAN IN AMERICA !

the actors, that it may be easily and certainly deduced
from them.

It is the object of the present work, as its title pur-
ports, to refer these principles to the life of woman, and
especially to determine from her position in America, and
her powers, as developed by that position, what is the
work designed for her here, and what the reward which
awaits its performance.

HER WORK AND HER REWARP. 21

CHAPTER II,

WOMAN HER OFFICES AND HER POWERS.

How many eloquent theses have been written, and
how much logic wasted, to prove the equality of the
sexes ! It seems to us, that the writers and speakers on
this subject would have done well to commence by de-
fining their terms. What is meant by equality as here
used ? Is it intended to convey the idea that the soul of
woman is as precious to the Father of Spirits as that of
man ; that woman has an equal interest with man in all
those great events which have marked the dealings of
God with His intelligent creation on our earth, from the
hour in which Adam, awaking from a deep sleep, found
beside him the companion of his sinless and happy life,
to the present moment, when the sin-stricken and sor-
rowing soul of man, echoing the divine conviction that it
is not good for him to be alone, still seeks in woman his
"help-meet" in the labors, the trials, and sufferings of
mortality ? Are we to understand from it that woman,

22 WOMAN IN AMEKICA I

equally with man, has a trust committed to her by the
Judge of all, for the fulfilment of which she will be held
responsible ? Can these things be matters of doubt ?
Were not Mary and Martha loved as well as Lazarus ?
Did not the soul of Anna kindle with as divine an inspi-
ration as that of Simeon, when she held in her arms the
infant Saviour ?

Or is the question, whether woman exerts an equally
important influence over the character and destinies of
our race ? This can scarcely be a question to one famil-
iar with the records of Paradise and of Bethlehem.

And yet the unqualified assertion of equality between
the sexes, would be contradicted alike by sacred and
profane history. There is a political inequality, ordained
in Paradise, when God said to the woman, " He shall
'rule over thee," and which has ever existed, in every
tribe, and nation, and people of earth's countless multi-
tudes. Let those who would destroy this inequality,
pause ere they attempt to abrogate a law which ema-
nated from the all-perfect Mind. And let not Avoman
murmur at the seeming lowliness of her lot. There is
a dignity which wears no outward badge, an elevation
recognised by no earthly homage. This wise, and for
her most happy inequality, secludes woman from the

HEE WOEK AND HEE EEWAED. 23

arena of political contention, with its strifes and rivalries,
its mean jealousies and meaner pretensions, in the quiet
home where truth may show herself unveiled, and peace
may dwell unmolested. • She hears the thunders of no
battle-field drowning the "still, small voice" of con-
science echoing the divine command, " Thou shalt do no
murder." All the influences of that lot to which God
assigned her, are calculated to nurture in her that meek
and lowly spirit with which He delights to dwell.

Subjected to influences so diverse, man and woman
could scarcely have preserved entire identity in then*
spiritual natures, even had they been originally the same.
But that they were so will seem doubtful, at least, to
those who know how much spiritual manifestations — all
we can know of spirit here — are dependent upon physical
organization ; and who, recognising the different spheres
of action appointed to man and to woman, recall one of
the general principles already advanced, viz. that each
creature in the universe finds itself in that position for
which its peculiar organization has fitted it, and discovers
in its offices the exact correlatives of its powers.

Different offices and different powers — this is what we
would assert of them, leaving to others the vain question
of equality or inequality. Each seems to us equally

24 WOMAN IN AMEEICA:

important to the fulfilment of God's designs in the
formation, the preservation, and the perfection of human
society.

The stout heart and strong hand of man are obviously
needed in every successive stage of social organization,
from its earliest attempts to the highest development it
has yet attained. There has been a time predicted,,
indeed, and we humbly hope there are already tokens
that this good time is coming, when "the wolf shall
dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with
the kid, and the young lion and the fatling together, and
a little child shall lead them ;" that is, when the passions
which have made mankind like ferocious animals shall be
subdued, and a little child — the type of love — shall lead
those for whom bolts and bars had been needed. But
till that period arrive, would not our earth be as one
wide Bedlam were it not that the strong arm of govern-
ment supplies outward restraints for those who have no
restraining principle within ? And this government — is
it not clearly man's province ? Has it not, been commit-
ted to him by Heaven, and is not the nature with which
he has been gifted the seal of that commission ? Law
is an uncompromising, inexorable power ; can it be the
product of a gentle woman's mind ? It must be upheld

HEB-WOBK AST) HER EEWAED. 25

by a force which will prove opposition bootless^ does
that belong to woman ?

But while all the outward machinery of government,
the body, the thews and sinews of society, are man's,
woman, if true to her own not less important or less
sacred mission, controls its vital principle. Unseen her-
self, working, like nature, in secret, she regulates its
pulsations, and sends forth from its heart, in pure and
temperate flow, the life-giving current. It is hers to
warm into life the earliest germs of thought and feeling
in the infant mind, to watch the first dawning of light
upon the awakening soul, to aid the first faint struggles
of the clay-encumbered spirit to grasp the beautiful
realities which here and there present themselves amid
the glittering falsities of earth, and to guide its first tot-
tering steps into the paths of peace. And who does not
feel how her warm affections and quick irrepressible
sympathies fit her for these labors of love? As the
young immortal advances in his career, he comes to need
a severer discipline, and man, with his unconceding
reason and stern resolve, becomes his teacher. Yet

think not that woman's work is done when the child has

r
passed into the youth, or the youth into the man. Still,

as disease lays its hand heavily upon the strong frame,
. 3

26 WOMAN IN AMEKICA :

and sorrow wrings the proud heart of man, she, " the
help-meet," if faithful to her allotted work, is at his side,
teaching him to bend to the storms of life, that he may
not be broken by them ; humbly stooping herself, that
she may remove from his path every '•' stone of stum-
bling," and gently leading him onward and upward to a
Divine Consoler, with whose blessed ministerings the
necessities of a more timid spirit and a feebler physical
organization have made her familiar.

It may be thought that we have already penetrated to
the heart of our subject, and exhausted all its capabil-
ities ; but we have, in truth, only touched its surface,
giving the faintest outline of those distinctive character-
istics which permit us to consider the work and the
reward of woman, apart from that of man. Let it be
remembered, that to every thing in nature there is a
passive as well as an active aspect. Thus, while woman
does much to form the nation, 'whose council-halls will
bear the impress of those forms into which she has
greatly aided to mould its homes, the nation, the laws,
customs, and habits of the society in which she dwells,
will do much to form her. It follows from this, that
while the grand elements of character which distinguish
woman as a class, are the same everywhere and at alj

HER WORK AND HEK REWARD. 2*7

times, the combination of these into the individual wo-
man is almost infinitely varied. This is a necessary
result of that often iterated principle, that the great
Author of nature and Disposer of the circumstances of
human life, never repeats Himself.

Go out into the forest when its summer foliage makes
its recesses dim with shade; what arithmetic would
suffice to number the leaves which dance with such glad
life to the soft music of the south wind ? As well might
you attempt to number the stars of heaven, or the sands
upon the seashore. And yet we doubt whether of all
those countless myriads, two could be found so exactly
alike that no difference of shape or shade should mark to
a careful observer their individuality. Thus is it with
the human face ; for though we have heard of doubles
among men, that is, of two men between whom there
existed so perfect a resemblance that each might pass
for the other, we suspect that could they be placed
together, there would always be found some difference
in the color of hair, or eyes, or complexion, some turn of
countenance, some frown of the brow or smile of the lip,
peculiar to one of them, — distinctions slight, it may be,
yet sufficient to establish the personal identity of each.
And thus, we believe, too, is it with the mental features.

28 WOMAN IN AMEEICA :

We have not now, however, to do with those minute
peculiarities stamping the individual character, but with
those more widely extended, though less deeply marked
traits which we term national. These are easily recogni-
sable in the physical man. There are few who cannot
distinguish at a glance the quick, mercurial Frenchman
from the heavy, slow, but deep-thinking German, or the
sturdy Englishman, less quick than the first, less pro-
found than the last, yet, by his unwearied perseverance,
accomplishing more than both put together. We be-
lieve that the peculiar social and political institutions of
America must also produce a 'peculiar modification of
character, in accordance with the law of adaptation al-
ready stated. Such a modification has indeed been
already produced. to a certain extent, but there have
been counter-influences which have greatly limited this
result. One of these counter-influences is to be found
in the frequent and easy communication with other lands
attainable in the present day; and another in that — shall
we say national humility ? — which makes us ever ready
to yield our own sense of what is suitable, convenient, or
agreeable, to the caprices of a leader of ton in London or
Paris.

It is this last barrier to the perfect moral adaptation

HER WORK AOT) HER REWARD. 29

of American women to American society, against which
whatever influence this little book may claim will be
exerted. We would, if possible, persuade American
women to look at those points in their own condition
which distinguish them from their sex elsewhere, and
from this their favorable position, and from the power it
confers on them, to augur what an important work- has
been committed to them, and what a noble destiny
awaits them if thev are true to that work.
3*

30 WOMAN IN AMEEICA :

CHAPTER III,

GOD IN HISTORY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

IT may be well, perhaps, before taking another step in
our argument, to pass rapidly over those by which we
have arrived at our present position. The first assertion
which we made and which we deemed no argument
necessary to sustain, was that the Creator was likewise
the Governor of our world, and therefore that we might
expect to find the great principles of the natural world
reasserted in the moral. On a survey of these principles,
we found that nothing was created simply for its own
enjoyment — that every creature had a work to do in the
great laboratory of the universe, and that for its own
peculiar work each was specially adapted by its organi-
zation.

From these natural principles we inferred that each
class of moral and intellectual beings had also its appoint-
ed task, and that the task thus allotted to man and

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 31

woman differed just in proportion to the different physi-
cal organization and spiritual development, at least, re-
ceived from their Creator and moral Governor.

Another glance at the natural world showed us an-
other fact ; viz. that the great Author of nature never
repeats Himself, but- that leaf differs from leaf, and man

from man. Let us dwell for a moment on this fact, and

•
see how it harmonizes with the laws already announced.

Each, it has been said, has his appropriate work to do,
and in that work finds the exact correlative of his power,
which power is the sum of his natural capabilities and of
the circumstances in which he has been placed, and
through which those capabilities must be developed and
exercised. Now, is it not manifest that from the multi-
plied combinations resulting from the diversity of capa-
bilities and of circumstances, we have the source of a
variety in character and office limited only by the num-
ber of the earth's inhabitants ?

But the laws of the great Ruler apply no less to
national than to individual existences. He sent confusion
among the Heaven-defying builders of Babel, that,
driven asunder, they might people remote portions of
the globe, and growing into nations under widely-differ-
ing influences, ^ach might be moulded into that form

32 WOMAN IN AMEKICA :

necessary to render it the agent of His providence for
special ends.

- Jt would be interesting, indeed, holding in our hands
the clue furnished by this principle of the adaptation of
each existence, whether individual or national, to its ap-
propriate work, to tread the inmost recesses of the laby-
rinth of history, — gathering in pur passage new proofs of
the goodness and wisdom of Him who ruleth over the
inhabitants of earth, new cause for the humble pros-
tration of our spirits before the King of kings and Lord
of lords. There we should mark how amid the som-
bre despotism and the monster worship of Egypt had
arisen a class of men, whose active minds desiring some
avenue to power from which that despotism could not
debar them, had sought and found it at the altar of the
veiled Isis, Nature, whose secrets were typified by mys-
tic rites and guarded in subterranean temples. We
should see the science thus acquired wrought into more
graceful forms by the polished Greeks, and under the
comparative freedom of their institutions we should find
the human mind trained to the discussion of all those
great questions affecting its origin, its progress, and its
destiny ; and by that very discussion the depth of its
darkness and the necessity of a Divine Teacher would be

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 33

revealed to us. The results thus obtained we should
find disseminated over the world by the indomitable
power and boundless ambition of the haughty Roman,
and the way thus prepared for the coming of Him who
should be a "Light to lighten the Gentiles" as well
as "the salvation of His people Israel." And in this
people Israel we should discover the most indubitable
proofs of Providential arrangement, — sequestered, as they
were, from all other nations, their race preserved uncor-
rupted amid the extremes of proud elevation and of de-
feat, captivity, and exile, that the Messiah for whom they
waited, only that they might reject him, should appear
to all as indeed the promised Deliverer, He whom their
prophets had predicted, and the antetypes of their his-
tory and their worship had alike foreshadowed.

So far, it is probable, most Christian readers of history
have pursued the train of thought designated. But
shall we pause here ? Were the purposes of God to-
wards our race accomplished with the coming of -the
Deliverer ? Had they been, why delay the last act of
the sublime drama — the end of all things ?

Let us advance, still holding that clue which has
guided us in safety so far. A few centuries pass away,
during which, aided by the consolidation into one vast

34 WOMAN IN AMEEICA :

empire of almost the whole known world, and by the
community of language and facility of intercourse thus
produced, the Christian faith has extended itself nomi-
nally to nearly all the nations and tribes of men. Wher-
ever the Roman standard floats, the cross — the symbol
of sinning, suffering, and regenerated humanity — has met
the eye, aroused the mind, andtstirred the heart of man.
But that symbol has become the badge of an earthly
domination. The Church, grown proud in her prosperi-
ty, thinks no more of "fulfilling in her own body the
measure of her Lord's sufferings," — of devoting herself to
the object for which He lived and died — the salvation of
mankind. The removal to Byzantium of the imperial
throne had left to the visible head of the Church, the
Bishop of Rome, the supreme temporal authority over
the Western nations. But that body, which was the
keeper of the sacred archives whence man draws the
law of his life and the charter of his immortality, could
not be suffered to merge its nobler office in an earthly
sovereignty, and Rome finally succumbed beneath the
repeated attacks of those barbarian hordes led by the
" Scourge of God" upon the sunny plains of Italy from
the sounding shores of the Baltic, and the recesses of
forests dark with the shade of ages. And here we see

HER WORK A1STD HER REWARD. 35

how, through the " darkest woof" of national as well as
of individual life, " there runs the golden thread of love."
The Church was driven back to her own proper sphere ;
she no longer wielded the sword of temporal power, but
as the vicegerent of God, the medium through which
His will was made known to the waiting spirit, she ex-
ercised soon a far higher sovereignty. The barbarian
conqueror bowed at her footstool, levied tribute for her
support, and led his armies in her defence. Whatever
we may think of the Church of Rome at the present
time, it is impossible not to recognise in her pompous
ritual and gorgeous decoration, means admirably adapt-
ed to secure the homage of the untutored minds thus
subjected to her influence ; while in her uncompromising
assertion of despotic authority in all matters of belief,
we see the only power, humanly speaking, by which,
through long ages of darkness, among fierce strifes and
ever-changing political organizations, the true Christian
faith, from which, amid all her perversions in practice,
this church never long varied in principle, could have
been preserved.

Christianity having once taken root hi the earth, and
having, nominally at least, extended its empire over
those nations which were to be the earth's rulers, the

36 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

great object for which Rome had been permitted to
establish so wide a sovereignty was answered, and that
sovereignty was broken up into many smaller states, in
which variety of laws and social institutions produced
variety of character. Still, however, over these states
the Church maintained her spiritual supremacy. The
fierce spirits of their barbarian inhabitants were thus
tamed into reverence, and those who might have defied
the Invisible we're subdued into lowly submission before
the visible representative of His power.

But the Church, becoming more and more corrupt in
practice, less and less true to the faith she taught, at
length betrayed so far her sacred mission as to make a
traffic of the spiritual mysteries she held, that she might
build up thereby her temporal magnificence. In doing
this she proved that these mysteries, for the teaching of
which she had been expressly organized, were to her but
cunningly devised fables. The glory had departed from
her, and had not the sceptre been wrested from her
hands, the shadow of a universal skepticism would soon
have fallen on our race. In the mean time, among the
forests and hills of Germany, a people of thoughtful
mind and earnesi faith and courageous nature, had been
preparing, from whom first arose the cry for the bread

HER WORK ANT) HER REWARD 3*7

•

of life, in which all the northern nations of Europe soon
joined. Macaulay, with that masterly vigor which ever
marks his touch, has depicted the extent of the Reforma-
tion, and the political causes why it went so far and why
it failed to go farther. . May a humbler hand be per-
mitted to add to these political causes, one which is the
result of faith in that

— " Divinity which shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will "

These northern nations were not of higher intelligence
or deeper piety than those who dwelt in wanner climes,
but the stern contest with the unfriendly elements in
which then* lives were passed, and the character of their
institutions, had given energy to their frames and inde-
pendence to their spirits — had accustomed them to do
their own thinking and their own fighting — had matured
them into men who might now be trusted to defend the
faith they had attained, from the attacks of infidelity on
the one hand and of superstition on the other. The
more southern nations of Europe, lulled in the lap of
ease, their sky all sunshine and their earth all flowers,
had become indolent and luxurious, and indolence and
luxury had done its usual work upon them, enervating

38 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

the mind as well as the body. Of little value to them
would have been the right to judge for themselves.
Elegant scholars, charming poets, exquisite artists were
they, but thinking — thinking of so grave and stern a
character as those subjects require which are involved in
our religious faith — this was a labor which they would
have preferred, probably, under any circumstances, to
relinquish to others ; and if they must be guided, better
for them the Church of Rome, even with all the faults

, her worst enemies can attribute to her, than the reckless,
mocking spirit of infidelity. To such minds, " to exam-
ine all things and hold fast that which is good," is a
well-nigh impossible achievement — they believe all or
reject all. Earnest and true believers were many of
them in the church to which they committed themselves
soul and body, and roused by her peril, they cast aside
their luxury, forgot their sloth, and did battle for her
valiantly with both sword and pen. She was still to
them the representative of the Holy, and they could
still worship through her "in spirit and in truth."
Thus, through all the changes of the Reformation com-
menced by Luther, do we still see the Divine Wisdom

' presiding over the destinies of man — liberating from the
thrall of superstition, not those who had attained to the

HEE WORK AND .HER REWARD. 39

highest civilization — who possessed the most acute and
subtle intellects — but those nations, and those only, who,
amidst an almost rude simplicity of life, had formed
habits of earnest, truthful, and courageous thought, and
whose strength, rough though it might be, permitted
them to stand alone, to preserve their mental freedom
without suffering it to degenerate into license.

Isolated from the reformed nations of which we have
spoken, by natural position and political institutions, yet
tracing their ancestry, in part at least, to the same source,
speaking a kindred language, and stamped with many of
the same characteristics, mental and physical, dwelt a
people destined to exercise, through their arts and their
arms, through the extent of their commerce and their
colonies, an influence more potent than ever belonged
to any other. Rome boasted that she gave laws to
one world ; England has planted the seed of her free
institutions in two — seed which has sent its firm roots
deep and wide into the heart of earth. And by what
wonderful arrangements of an all-governing Power, was
this people moulded for their work? With the brave
old Briton, whose undisciplined valor left the Roman
legions little to boast in their conquest, must unite the
thoughtful spirit of the German, and to these must be

40 WOMAN IN AMERICA:

i ^

added the fiery soul of the Norman, himself a compound
of the rude, stern, all-subduing North, with the quick,
gay, brilliant influences of sunny France, ere the metal
shall be rightly tempered from which that mould is cast.
The result has been a people whose deep thoughts are
the parents of great actions ; who, to the profound
reasoning of the German, add the quick action of the
Frenchman ; who apply every idea to the purposes of
practical life, and who therefore used the arms which
had freed them from spiritual despotism, to win for
themselves political liberty, denying the divine right of
the king over their bodies and estates, as well as of
the Pope over their souls.

From this nation proceeded the American people.
We are the offspring, not of their immature youth, not
of their feeble age, but of the strength of their manhood,
when they had attained their fullest development, and
when that development, untouched by one symptom of
decay, still gave promise of immortality. The old
Northman seemed to have roused himself from the
slumber of ages, as our ancestors turned from the smil-
ing shores of England to seek new homes in unknown
lands across the sea. They came with loftier objects
than Northman ever knew, and animated by holier hopes

HER WORK AKD HER REWARD. 41

»

than ever beamed upon his spirit. Before we depict
those objects, or refer to those hopes, let us recall the
principles already asserted, and ask, whether the' nation
thus carefully prepared and providentially brought
hither, had no peculiar work to do ? Perhaps, from
the circumstances attending their formation into a dis-
tinct people, and the peculiar forms thus impressed upon
their social and political life, this work may be deduced.
We will seek for it there ; and we will endeavor, there-
fore, in the next chapter rapidly to sketch these circum-
stances and forms.

4*

42 WOMAN IN AMERICA

CHAPTER IV,

FEUDALISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

IN glancing rapidly over the governments of the old
world, we find everywhere one principle appearing under
forms variously modified by the characteristics of the
people and the countries over which they have been
established. This principle is feudalism, from which all
these governments grew- up. Trace them back to their
earliest beginnings, and we arrive ever at some military
chieftain, whose right was the product of his might,
gathering about him his more peaceful or more feeble
neighbors, and purchasing their fealty by his protection.
The diffusion of Christianity and the establishment of
law have, in many countries, broken down the original
forms of feudalism and crippled its gigantic power, yet it
still lives.

Fortified castles with portcullis and drawbridge, walls
bristling with spears, and dungeons to which the light of
day never enters, no longer frown defiance from every

HEE WOEK AND HEE EEWAED. 43

cliff, or look down with proud superiority on the humble
hut of the artisan which has sought safety in its shadow,
or the peaceful abode of the burgher, who must lay on
its threshold a large portion of the wealth purchased by
many toils as a peace-offering for the possession of the
remainder. But the descendants of those who held
those castles still claim the land that lay around them
for many a mile, thus concentrating in the hands of a
few the fair earth which God created for all ; while on
this far- extended surface hundreds, made of the same
clay and deriving their life from the same divine source,
labor unceasingly from dawn to dark to supply luxuries
to the owner of the soil, and to themselves and their
families the merest necessaries of an existence little ele-
vated above that of the brute. Even in Christian
England — England, which we honor for its noble institu-
tions, and love as the land in which our fathers first
drew breath, as the land which has given us laws and
language, and from whose literature our spiritual life has
been drawn — even in England this deadly Upas has dif-
fused its baleful influence ; feudalism is still the vital
principle of many of her institutions, and reappears per-
petually in her life, political and social. We see this
with pain, and admit it with reluctance, for the spirit of

44 WOMAN IN AMEKICA :

feudalism is so opposed to the spirit of Christianity, that
we cannot resist the conviction that as the latter tri-
umphs, the former, and all to which it gives life, must
be destroyed. Let us hope that in England this will be
but as the wood and hay and stubble which may be
burned, and leave the gold and silver and precious stones
unharmed.

" No principle has long held influence over the popu-
lar mind which did not embody some truth," says a dis-.
tinguished writer, and feudalism offers no exception to
the rule. Honor to the brave hearts and the strong
hands, which, " when there was no law were a law unto
themselves," and won lands, and lordships, and fair re-
nown, by aiding the weak, defending the innocent, and
punishing the oppressor. There was truth in them, and
well might the feeble seek to dwell within their shadow,
and the industrious artizan and tradesman give some-
thing of their gains to those who, to secure to them the
quiet possession of the remainder —

" Slept with heads upon the sword
Their fevered hands must grasp in waking."

But with the sovereignty of law this aspect of feudal-
ism has passed away. The artisan and tradesman no
longer need a defender — the law spreads her aegis over

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. • 45

them, and secures to them the possession of their gains,
— the produce of their toil. The same law, with im-
partial hand, protects the earl or duke in the lands and
lordship which his father won. Well for this earl or
duke it may be, that the price by which they were
held, — the protection of the weak and the defence of
the land in which he dwells, — are no longer claimed, for
alas ! strong hands and brave hearts are not always,
like lands and lordships, transmissible by descent.

We would not be understood to assert that there are
not those who use the power and property which they
owe to the old feudalism for good — who obey the Chris-
tian law of benevolence, so far as they can without re-
linquishing the rights of their birth and station and thus
breaking up the very foundations of the society in which
they dwell, and whose peace and welfare they are bound
to seek. Such, could this page meet their eye, would
probably be the first to feel and to acknowledge with
us, that feudalism and the wide and permanent dis-
tinctions in society which have grown out of it, are so

far inconsistent with the spirit of that gospel which pro-

mL,
claims everywhere, " Love your neighbor as yourself" —

"All ye are brethren"— that it renders obedience to its
laws more difficult. Distinctions there will be indeed,

46 ' WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

while one has ten talents, another five, and another only
one committed to him. While the laws established by
God remain unchanged, the idle and dissolute father
must leave his offspring to reap the bitter fruits of his
acts in poverty and disgrace, and the industry, temper-
ance, and integrity, of our progenitors, secure for us a
vantage-ground in the race of life. But these distinc-
tions are open to all — they stimulate therefore the efforts
of all — they say not to any, " Stand aside, you may not
enter here as a competitor." Widely differing from these
are the distinctions which feudalism has bequeathed to
every nation in which it has existed. There the distinc-
tions are not of the various grades of talent, but of the
common clay and the fine porcelain, the folly of the last
being more excellent than the wisdom of the first.
There we have classes privileged to live on the labor of
others, to eat their bread in the sweat not of their .own,
but of their neighbors' brows, — escaping the sentence
pronounced in Eden, by laying on their fellows their
share of the burden which it was designed that all should
bear. The hut there must be poorer that the palace
may be richer. Again we say, that all this is diametrically
opposed to the spirit of .Christianity, which teaches the
brotherhood of all men.

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 47

But while we thus see the wrongs which have be-
come inextricably intertwined with all institutions based
upon feudalism, let it not be thought that we are of
those who could ruthlessly sweep those institutions from
the earth. They are as structures venerable for age, and
associated with all which we regard as most hallowed in
the past. In these associations, and hi their picturesque
beauty, they possess a charm for the heart and the ima-
gination which cannot be effaced by their utter unsuit-
ableness to the present aspects of life. We shall mourn
their downfall, come when it will. We cannot spare
even one leaf of the ivy which is destroying while it
decorates them. Yet " we rejoice with joy unspeakable'.'
that the great Ruler of the earth has permitted other
structures to be erected free from these dangerous deco-
rations— other institutions to arise from which these
wrongs have been excluded. Such we conceive to be
the government of the United States of North America,
whose earliest settlement was a protest against feudalism,
with all its train of abuses in church and state. We are
thus brought to the object of the present chapter, viz :
a sketch of the circumstances under which these states
were settled, and of the peculiar forms impressed on
their government.

48 WOMAN IN AMERICA I

In saying that the earliest settlement in the United
States was a protest against feudalism and its attendant
abuses, we did not mean to deny that attempts had been
made to settle here from other and less noble motives.
The haughtiest and most despotic of the Tudors yet
reigned over a submissive people, when the first unfortu-
nate colony was planted on the Roanoke by the chival-
rous Raleigh ; and the absurdities and petty tyranny of
the first and meanest of the Stuarts had not yet roused
the English mind to resistance against hereditary power,
when the little band into which the spirit of the adven-
turous Smith alone infused endurance, landed in Vir-
ginia, and marked their homage to their liege lord, by
giving to the noble river up which' they sailed, and to
the town which they planted on its banks, the name of
James. But the first of these colonies vanished from
the earth, leaving no trace behind them, almost as soon
as they were left by their commander, and the last ling-
ered on in a state which daily threatened extinction, till
the stern necessities of their position, and the ignorance
and narrow policy of their patrons abroad, had forced
them into a freer and more self-relying life. From
mutual hardships and mutual aid sprang the spirit of
true brotherhood and equality, and the government,

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 49

throwing off its aristocratic and feudal forms, became free
and popular, and in its freedom found strength, — then,
and not till then, firmly rooting itself in the American
soil. The next who sought our shores were the Puri-
tans, who, driven by persecution from their homes in
England, found a refuge first in Holland, and then on
the bleak and rock-bound shores of New England. The
despotic authority of the king or feudal lord, and of the
bishop appointed by him, they denied in the very act of
coming hither, and though they long continued to cling
to England as their own and their fathers' home, it is
impossible to read their simple narration of their voyage
and their landing, of their early attempts at govern-
ment, and the manner in which the various difficulties
they encountered were met, without recognising in that
small community the germ of the present republic of
these United States. They then emphatically declared
by their actions, what more than one hundred and fifty
years after their descendants expressed in words : —
"We are, and of right ought to be, free and indepen-
dent." It is true they imperfectly understood the ex-
tent of those principles on which they acted, as they
proved by not allowing to others the same freedom
which they claimed for themselves. They were still
5

50 WOMAN IN AMERICA:

but on the threshold of the temple of liberty which
they were one day to enter, and the gates of which,
having once entered, they would throw open to the
world. From them went forth Roger Williams, the
Baptist. The sect to which he belonged bears at this
day the stigma of being the most narrow and bigotted
among those who call themselves by the Christian name,
yet they were in truth the first to set the world the
example of perfect religious toleration. In the laws
framed for that society which planted itself on Narra-
ganset Bay, in what is now the little state of Rhode
Island, Jew and Pagan, Mahomedan and Christian,
might each worship the Universal Father in the mode
dictated by his own conscience, while this mode did not
interfere with the rights of others. The same large
spirit of toleration appeared in the Roman Catholic Lord
Baltimore, who, in the constitution prepared for the col-
onists of Maryland, placed worshippers of every Chris-
tian faith on perfect political equality. Pennsylvania
and South Carolina were, like Massachusetts, settled, at
least in part, by those who were seeking a refuge from
religious and political oppression. Little attachment to
the arbitrary institutions under whose sway they had
suffered, could be supposed to live in the hearts of the

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 51

Quakers of England or the Huguenots of France. The
first inhabitants of New York were Hollanders — a peo-
ple more republican two hundred years ago, than now —
and when it passed under the dominion of England, little
change was made in its government. Georgia alone, of
all the Atlantic states, was settled under the immediate
auspices of royalty, and there, as in Virginia, it was not
till the colony had ceased to look abroad for support, till
it had become self-relying, and had so modified its origi-
nal institutions as to give equal rights to all, that it be-
gan to prosper. Thus, by seemingly fortuitous circum-
stances, in which the devout mind recognises an over-
ruling Providence, in some cases without, and, in some
cases even against the design of the colonists themselves,
the settlements made in that part of North America
called the United States, were moulded into forms calcu-
lated to foster the spirit of equality, of brotherhood, —
while each generation, as it passed, has done its part to-
wards sweeping away the faint traces of the old feudal-
ism which lingered amongst us. See here, then, the
wide difference between our civilization and that of every
other Christian nation — feudalism lying at the root of all
then* institutions, and intertwining itself with their very
life.

52 WOMAN IN AMEUICA:

We will not deny that we have lost some desirable
things in our progress. Our life is not and cannot be so
picturesque as that on which the old feudal times have
impressed their imposing forms. No palaces, with their
broad parks, their waving banners, and battlemented
towers — no old cathedral, with its fretted roofs and
" long-drawn aisles," the work of many generations, may
rear their stately heads upon our hill sides, or in our
flowery vales. No monarch, with diadem and sceptre —
no nobles, with gorgeous robes, and all the glittering
insignia of rank, dignify and adorn our social life — no
prelate with flowing vestments, uniting in his person
sanctions human and Divine — the power of the church
and of the state — claims our homage. We have thus
lost, with much that charms the eye, the highest visible
representatives of earthly majesty and of spiritual su-
premacy. And in losing these, we incur the hazard
of a much more serious loss. Some of the noblest
properties of our nature have been exercised by the
very inequalities we have condemned and discarded.
Such are the loyalty which clings with unshaken de-
termination to the object of its faith, amid disaster, and
even in ruin — and the reverence which does homage
to nobleness of spirit and purity of soul in their visible

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 53

types. It is true that these qualities, in their highest
development, demand no visible representative of the
sublime ideals to which they attach themselves — that
reverence bows with a purer and more self-abasing pros-
tration before the majesty of virtue and the beauty of
holiness, than before the mitred head and spotless lawn
— and that loyalty is more intact when exercised in
the defence of an unchanging principle, than of 'any
human, and therefore fallible, embodiment of that prin-
ciple. But it is also true, that, while the earthly, with
its loud trumpet-calls and imposing shows, commands
the attention of all, comparatively few are capable of
that vigorous effort necessary to keep the mind awake
to the claims of the unseen and spiritual, with its " still,
small voice ;" and thus the loyalty and the reverence
yielded to nothing else, may become forgotten things.

Lest we should seem by these admissions to give too
great a triumph to the opponents of our institutions, let
us add, that if we have no splendid palaces, we have no
huts green with damp and mouldering with decay ; if
we have no cathedrals which wake the world's wonder
by their vastness and the elaborate style of then- archi-
tecture, we have few, if any, villages in our land where
at least one slender spire does not attract the eye and
5*

54 WOMAN iisr AMEKICA:

the thoughts Heavenward. Let it be understood also,
that we do not admit a necessity for the sacrifice, under
our equalizing institutions, of any quality essential to the
perfection of our nature. There is danger, as we have
said, of such sacrifices ; but the danger may be averted —
by what means we will endeavor to show hereafter.

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 55

CHAPTER V.

SOCIAL LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES.

FROM the forests of Germany, from the foamir » seas
of the North ; through sunny France and Engla; .d, no-
ble England, our Fatherland, we have been led hither
and have been built up into a nation ; the first in the
world's history which has been reared on ground unen-
cumbered by old superstititions, and which has had for
its corner-stone a perfect civil and religious liberty.
Hither have we been led, and here have we been built up ;
for not by our own might or power, but by that of the •
living God was the work accomplished. Vain indeed
would boasting be in us, for, like the Israelites of old,
" we were led by a way we knew not of." It was under
the influence of English life that our fathers grew into
the stature of perfect men. They were Englishmen
when refusing to submit their consciences to the dicta-
tion of any human power, they came here to establish as
Americans that perfect liberty which as Englishmen they

56 WOMAN ESr AMERICA .'

had conceived and loved, but which they knew it would
be impossible to enjoy in a country into whose soil feu-
dalism had struck its roots so deeply, that it must be the
work of many years, perhaps of centuries, to extirpate
them without danger to the noble edifices erected upon
them. To us, their children, it belonged to complete
what they had commenced, to fill up the fair outline
which they had sketched, and to show the world the
beauty of that Christian freedom with whose ideal they
had become enamored, and in pursuit of which they had
adventured and endured so much.

And how have we fulfilled this duty ? In our politi-
cal life, nobly. He who giveth wisdom hath made our
counsellors wise ; for our national acts have been, with
few exceptions, marked by that sturdy common sense
derived from our parent stock, and by that devotion to
liberty to which we owe our existence as a distinct
people.

But while such has been the aspect of our political
life, far different has been that of our social life. As a
nation independent, self-relying, and moving onward with
a calmness marking just confidence in our powers, and a
hearty conviction of the truth of our principles ; in social
life we have been servile imitators, the apes of every

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 57

folly, and apologists of every vice to which European
custom has given a sanction.

And whence springs this great difference ? Is it not
that — while American statesmen, those who preside over
our national acts, have understood then- position, and,
having a definite aim, have advanced to its accomplish-
ment with assured steps — American women, those who
preside over social life, "have understood neither their
present position nor the future to which they are tend-
ing, and therefore have moved on without any definite
aim, " wandering clouds, carried hither and thither by
every wind" of fashion?

And must it be thus ? Is there not for us too a work
to do, a destiny to accomplish ? May not we, the
women of America, mould our social life by our intelli-
gent convictions into a form which shall make it the fit
handmaid of our political life in its grand simplicity and
lofty amis ? If we would accomplish this, one thing is
evident — so evident that it can scarcely require either
argument or persuasion to commend it to the acceptance
of every intelligent mind — it is, that we are to look else-
where than to Europe* for the model after which we are
to work. The social life we find there may be imposing
in its grandeur, beautiful in its refinements, and gorgeous

58 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

in its adornments to the eye of him who looks only on its
surface, but it cannot be made to harmonize with the
principles on which our political life, our very existence
as an independent nation, is founded.

This is, we repeat, a fact so obvious, that it cannot fail
to be accepted as truth by every intelligent mind. But
something more than the mind's acceptance is necessary
to give to any truth that living power which makes it
grow and bring forth fruit ; it must be received into the
heart, and against this truth, we fear, our hearts are still
closed. We are endeavoring to reconcile the irreconci-
lable ; and offer to the world, at present, the appearance
of architects who, having commenced a grand and noble
edifice in the simple Doric style, are striving to in-
graft upon their original plan the graceful decorations of
the Corinthian. Each style has a beauty of its own, but
the two united would produce only a grotesque absurd-
ity. Yet more striking would the absurdity be, if, as in
our own case, the resources of the architects were too
restricted to permit them to give the decorations at which
they aimed in all their richness and elegance, obliging
them to content themselves with such a poor seeming as
could satisfy only the most superficial and most inartistic
observer. Such must be our imitation of the social life

HEE WOEK AXD HEE EEWAED. 59

of those countries in which the whole landed property
was originally distributed amongst a few leaders, and
where the law of entail has confined the succession to
this property, with almost all the wealth accumulated
from it by centuries of careful cultivation, to nearly the
original number.

What is it amongst us which excites that ridicule
from foreigners, under which we have so often winced ?
Is it the simplicity of our political organization, the
plainness of our citizen-president, the unostentatious
home provided for his abode, and the unceremonious re-
ception which, as the representative of a republican peo-
ple, he gives to the representatives of other lands ? Is
it the academies and colleges, so much less liberally en-
dowed than their own, and wanting all that prestige, the
richest legacy of the past, with which time has hallowed
the halls of Oxford and of Cambridge ? Is it the com-
paratively small extent of our cities, or their want of
splendid architectural adornments? No, in some of
these things, if indeed they are persons possessing the
faculty of vision, they see that beautiful consistency of
practice and principle which all men honor ; and in oth-
ers they are ready to acknowledge that the wonder is
not that so little, but that so much has been done ; not

60 WOMAN IN AMEKICA :

that the result of two hundred years' labor here has not
equalled that of two thousand years abroad, but that it
has made so near an approximation to it. But when
they turn to our social life, to its feverish ambition, its
mean jealousies, its ostentatious displays, its fretful sen-
sitiveness, its strange contrasts, its want of all harmony
and beauty, of all repose and dignity, their respect for
us vanishes, and the kindliest feeling which can succeed,
is compassion for our vain struggles after the unattain-
able.

Let it not be thought that we would so belie our
country as to insinuate that this is all which our social
life presents ; but this is what lies on the surface, this,
ever eager for exhibition, starts forward and is first seen
by foreigners — first and often only seen. Often this
class presents all of society into which foreigners enter ;
and this, with uneducated laborers and the heterogene-
ous mixture of enterprising industry and despairing in-
dolence, of vice and misery, yearly received from Eu-
rope, makes up the sum of what they denominate
American society. Into the true American life, the life
in which labor and refinement walk hand in hand, in
which, with a thorough understanding of themselves and
their position, a class, intelligent, educated, and often

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 61

even highly accomplished, having set before them an
ideal nobler than any yet attained on earth, are working
out that ideal in the quietness of spirits dwelling in too
high a region to be disturbed by the capricious winds
and currents of fashion ; into this life they have never
entered, they know nothing of its existence, and if some
one from it crosses their path, he is but an individual,
an exception to general rules, his excellencies belong to
him as man — the shades, by which in the best those ex-
cellencies will be darkened, are American.

Let us not complain of this as unjust. These " sec-
ond Daniels" are but men, and judge, as we would do,
by what they see and hear, forgetting that not in the
thunder and the tempest, but in the still, small voice,
dwells the spirit and the power. For them and for the
world, at least the world among ourselves, to whom it is
of most importance, let us endeavor to lift the veil from
this true American life. Happy shall we be if we can
so reveal its beauty that those who look shall love and
strive to make it theirs.

6

62 WOMAN IN AMERICA :

CHAPTER VI,

SOCIAL EVILS WOMAN THEIR REFORMER.

IT has been often repeated, so often that many have
grown weary of the repetition, that one of the first prin-
ciples of our government is equality ; and yet it may be
doubted whether some among us would not find it diffi-
cult to define what this equality means, or in what it
consists. Not, surely, in personal qualities ; for none can
be so besotted as to imagine, that by simply being
Americans, they may claim equality with all of the same
nation in the dignities conferred by high moral or in-
tellectual power. Nor does it consist in an equal parti-
cipation in all the advantages which wealth and social
position confer ; for should any one claim this and at-
tempt to enforce his claim, the bolts of a prison or a
madhouse would soon teach him that the opinion of the
world was adverse to his own.

And yet it is not a vain boast, that we did first, as a
people, assert, and have striven to maintain, that all men

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 63

were born free and equal, — with equal right to enjoy and
to improve to the utmost, that heritage derived, under
Providence, from their progenitors.

Was thy father a builder of other men's houses — a
shoemaker, working at his last — or a blacksmith, wield-
ing the hammer with sturdy arm — and did he, by his
honest industry, win for thee, his loved one, a higher,
and in the world's judgment, a better fortune ? Let
him smile as he looks at thy boyish sports, and say to
himself — " Thy life shall be of a nobler sort than mine."
It shall be thine own fault if this saying prove not pro-
phetic. There is no seminary of learning in the land into
which his gold may not buy thee admittance, and there
thou shalt stand on such eminence as thy merits shall
command. From such seminary thou mayst pass into
the profession that best pleases thee; all are open to
thee, and that prophetic father may live to see thee a
judge on the bench of the Supreme Court, a senator in
the halls of Congress, or a President of the United
States. No privileged class shall say to thee — " Touch
not that honor — set not thy foot upon that eminence ; it
belongs to us." Thou art free ; free to develop thyself
as thy will shall prompt, and thy powers permit. This
world is God's world, and He hath given thee so much

64 WOMAN EST AMERICA :

of it as. thou, with thy best faculties, canst conquer.
Such is the language of our Constitution, to which
nothing in our political life gives denial. There the
cloth of frieze stands unrepulsed beside the cloth of
gold, and may even attain to a higher position ; but not
thus is it with our social life. There, the intellect may
glow with man's noblest powers, the heart throb with
his highest aspirations, and the manners may reflect, in
their gentleness and refinement, the glory of such powers
and such aspirations ; yet, if all this be covered by the
cloth of frieze, away Avith it — it may not enter the
charmed circle of "good society," or enter only after its
own degradation, as Samson, shorn of his locks, was
brought before the lords of the Philistines to make
sport for them.

And what constitutes this soi disant good society ?
"Wealth, and the senseless fripperies which wealth may
purchase. Oh ! give us back the old reverence for a
noble name. If we must have a privileged class — if we
must bear " the contumely which patient merit of the
unworthy takes," restore to us the illusion by which we
might fancy ourselves doing homage to the kingly spirits
of earth in the persons of their degenerate descendants.
In such homage there may be something ennobling ; but

HEE WOEK AND TTTra. EEWAED. 65

in this worship of Mammon, this bending the, spirit to
vulgarity and frivolity, because decorated with jewels
and brocade, there is every thing debasing. And to
what do we owe the strength of this sentiment of vene-
ration for wealth amongst us ? Is it not to our having
placed before us the social life of Europe as our model ?
Wetannot command domains associated with ancestral
names whose very sound is a spell, stirring the heart
like a trumpet-tone, and evoking images of past splendor
which throw a halo over ruin and decay ; but wealth
will enable us to build houses almost as large as those
to which these domains are attached, and a great deal
finer. Base and shaft to our Corinthian column may be
wanting ; but we will place the rich capital upon our
Doric base, and by covering its decorations with gold-
leaf, make it much more showy.

If we would cease to be the world's derision — if we
would take the position which God designed us to take
among the nations of the earth, we must put from us
this low ambition, we must understand our noble work,
and elevate our aims to its accomplishment.

Feudalism had its mission — a mission to educate men

\
into reverence and obedience. The rude, semi-barbarous

nations of Europe in the middle ages could not have ap-
6*

66 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

preciated the majesty of law, and would neither have
reverenced nor obeyed a power so spiritual. These
emotions, then, must be excited in their minds by that
physical force, and those outward -demonstrations of
superiority, which strike the senses. The diadem,
sparkling with gems, the purple robe, the golden scep-
tre, all the insignia of royal or of noble rank, all* the
rigid etiquette which marked the gradations of society,
and kept each class hedged in as by an insuperable
barrier, which was soon made to appear a divine and
indefeasible right — these were all but means towards the
accomplishment of this end. That they were wisely-
appointed and successful means, we may learn by a
glance at the history of the civilized world. Let us take
England, the most advanced in Christian civilization of
all those nations whose barbarous or semi-barbarous
origin required these educational processes. While at
every advancing step she has made, some form has been
discarded, or has, at least, ceased to awaken the public
reverence, has not the inner spirit which that form had
represented, the law, been more clearly revealed — win-
ning, in its majestic simplicity, a truer and more enduring
homage than had been yielded to its imposing represen-
tative ? There was a period in her history — the memo-

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 67

rable period of the Stuart dynasty — when the forms and
the spirit, royalty and the law whose power it had been
created to represent and to enforce, were arrayed against
each other, and the result proved that forms were fast
becoming useless to a nation which had learned well its
lesson of reverence to the spirit of law.

Yet, though their work was well nigh done, their use
had well nigh passed away, these forms must be recon-
ciled to the spirit of law, not discarded, for they were
but branches of that feudalism from which the whole
social structure had grown up. They must not be torn
away, lest that structure should be shaken to the base ;
they must be left to the action of time. Slowly, but
surely, they will decay and fall away of themselves.

And may it not be that in the neglect of the princi-
ples which have thus guided the English people, has
arisen the ill-success which has hitherto marked all other
European revolutions. The first French revolution, and
those lately occurring in some other European nations,
released from all the checks and restraints of outward
forms those who had been so held down by sheer, phy-
sical force, that their dwarfed minds and palsied hearts
had room for no emotions but those of selfish terror or
mad revenge. No reverence for God or man stayed

68 WOMAN IN AMERICA I

their fierce hands as, seizing on these feelings, the dema-
gogue of the hour swayed them hither or thither at his
will. Their gross senses could not appreciate the force
of the subtle spirit of law, their obedience could be ob-
tained only by the exhibition of material power, and thus
the institutions, on which their whole social life rested,
were torn away root and branch at one time, only to be
built up on the same basis in succeeding years. But the
English revolution, if the name of revolution may indeed
be given to that contest which ended with a change of
dynasty in England, was begun, continued, and ended in
a spirit of reverence for the law ; and this reverence
made the victorious party wisely careful not to touch
one institution which had become associated with the
law. " As our revolution was a vindication of ancient
rights, so it was conducted with strict attention to an-
cient formalities," says Macaulay, in that masterly work
which has left us little to learn in relation to this period
of English history.

And why was it that not till our ancestors had entered
on this great contest, did one of the many attempts
made to plant English colonies on these shores prove
successful ? Was it that they had now reached the cul-
minating point of their education in the love of liberty

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 69

and reverence for law ; that beyond this their advance
was stayed by the very arrangements which had been
necessary to their safe development so far ; that to at-
tain to a more perfect external development of their own
noble principles, they must be transplanted to a new
soil, and begin afresh the race of life, free from those
impediments whose demolition, where they have once ex-
isted, must ever be attended with danger of anarchy and
misrule ? Was it that here, on the basis of Christian
institutions and equal rights, we might find it easier to
construct that fair temple which has for its foundation
and its corner-stone, "Love God supremely, and your
neighbor, whether he be king or beggar, as yourself?"
We believe it was, and we would ask, why have we
made so little advance towards this highest attainment
in human association ? The answer to this question
-must be found, we think, in the fact already noted, that
the principles which we have politically asserted, we
have socially denied ; striving to establish socially the
inequalities against which we have politically rebelled,
only substituting for the distinctions of birth those crea-
ted by wealth.

In the rapid glance which we have taken of the vari-
ous influences that have combined to form the English

YO WOMAN IN AMERICA :

character, we have seen a nation happily " compounded
of every nation's best," trained to reverence of law and
love of liberty. In America we have seen this same
people taking a position in which that reverence for law
remained the only restraint upon their actions ; in which,
therefore, they were free in the best sense of the word,
free even as God made man, free from all restraint but
that which, at the command of an enlightened con-
science, he imposes on himself. To those who have fol-
lowed us in this sketch, and who, assenting to the pro-
position, that each creature in the Providence of God
finds itself in that condition for which it is peculiarly fit-
ted, and may thus discover in its offices the exact correl-
atives of its powers, — these powers being the sum of its
natural capabilities, and of the circumstances under
which these capabilities have been exercised and devel-
oped,— also think, with us, that while man has been en-
dowed with qualities which render him the proper con-
troller of the outward machinery of government, the
thews and sinews of society, woman is by nature equally
fitted to preside over its inner spirit, over the homes
from which the social as distinguished from the political
life must be derived ; the conclusion must, it seems to
us, be irresistible, that to American women we must

HEE WOEK AND HEE EEWAED. l

look to rectify the errors of American society, and that
from them we may hope to- derive a life freer from fac-
titious distinctions, controlled more by enlightened con-
victions and less by conventional forms, a life nobler,
more spiritual, more in conformity with Christian prin-
ciples than any the world has yet seen. To such a work
are we now endeavoring to awaken the attention of our
countrywomen. It is a noble work : a work which, we
think, they must themselves acknowledge to be worthy
the exercise of all their powers.

Permit us, in illustration of our subject, to place be-
fore you a sketch of an American woman of fashion as
she is and as she might be — as she must be to accom-
plish the task we would appoint her. Examine with a
careful eye " the counterfeit presentment" of these two
widely differing characters, and choose the model on
which you will form yourselves. And first, by a few
strokes of this magic wand — the pen — we will conjure
within the charmed circle of your vision, the woman of
fashion as she is.

Flirtilla, — for so noted a character must not want a
name, — may well be pronounced a favorite of nature and
of fortune. To the first she owed a pleasing person and
a mind which offered no unapt soil for cultivation ; by

72 WOMAN IN AMERICA I

favor of the last, she was born the heiress to wealth and
to those advantages which wealth unquestionably con-
fers. Her childhood was carefully sequestered from all
vulgar influences, and she was early taught, that to be a
little lady was her highest possible attainment. At six
years old she astonished the.tlite assembled in her fa-
ther's halls, and even dazzled the larger assemblages of
Saratoga by her grace in dancing and by the ease with
which she conversed in French, which, as it was the lan-
guage of her nursery attendants, had been a second
mother-tongue to her. At the fashionable boarding-
school, at which her education was, in common parlance,
completed, she distanced all competitors for the prizes in
modern languages, dancing, and music ; and acquired so
much acquaintance with geography and history as would
secure her from mistaking Prussia for Persia, or imagin-
ing that Lord Wellington had conquered Julius Caesar —
in other words, so much knowledge of them as would
guard her from betraying her ignorance. To these ac-
quirements she added a slight smattering of various natu-
ral sciences. All these accomplishments had nearly been
lost to the world, by her forming an attachment for one
of fine qualities, personal and mental, who was entirely
destitute of fortune. From the fatal mistake of yielding

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 3

to such an attachment she was preserved by a judicious
mother, who placed before her in vivid contrast the com-
manding position in which she would be placed as the
wife of Mr. A — , with his houses and lands, his bank
stock and magnificent equipage ; and the mediocre sta-
tion she would occupy as Mrs. B — , a station to which
one of her aspiring mind could not readily succumb, even
though she found herself there in company with one of
the most interesting and agreeable of men. Relinquish-
ing with a sigh the gratification of the last sentiment that
bound her to nature and .to rational life, she magnani-
mously sacrificed her inclinations to her sense of duty,
and became Mrs. A—. From this time her course has
been undisturbed by one faltering feeling, one wavering
thought. She has visited London and Paris, only that
she might assure herself that her house possessed all
which was considered essential to a genteel establishment
in the first, and that her toilette was the most rechercM
that could be obtained in the last. She laughs at the
very idea of wearing any thing made in America, and is
exceedingly merry over the portraitures of Yankee char-
acter and Yankee life occasionally to be met in the pages
of foreign tourists, or to be seen personated in foreign
theatres. She complains much of the prpmiscuous char-

Y

74 WOMAIST EST AMEKICA:

acter of American society, dances in no set but her own,
and, in order to secure her exclusiveness from contact
with the common herd, moves about from one point of
fashionable life to another, attended by the same satel-
lites, to whom she is the great centre of attraction. Her
manners, like her dresses, are imported from Paris. She
talks and laughs very loudly at all public places, lectures,
concerts, and the like ; and has sometimes, even in the
house of God, expressed audibly her assent with or dissent
from the preacher, that she may prove herself entirely free
from that shockingly American mauvaise honte, which she
supposes to be all that keeps other women silent. Any
gentleman desiring admission to her circle must produce
authentic credentials that he has been abroad, must wear
his mustaches after the latest Parisian cut, must interlard
his bad English with worse French, and must be familiar
with the names and histories of the latest ballet-dancers
and opera-singers who have created a fever of excitement
abroad. To foreigners she is particularly gracious, and
nothing throws her into such a fervor of activity as the
arrival in the country of an English Lord, a German
Baron,, or a French or Italian Count. To draw such a
character within her circle she thinks no effort too great,
no sacrifice of feeling too humiliating.

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 75

It may be objected that all our descriptions of the
fashionable woman as she is, relates to externals ; that
of the essential character, the inner life, we have, in
truth, said nothing. But what can we do ? So far as
we have yet been able to discover, this class is destitute
of any inner life. Those who compose it live for the
world and in the world. Home is with them only the
place in which they receive visits. We acknowledge
that few in our country have yet attained to so per-
fect a development of fashionable character as we have
here described ; but to some it is already an attain-
ment ; to many — we fear to most, young women of what
are called the higher classes in our large cities — it is an
aim. Nobler spirits there are, indeed, among us, of every
age and every class, and from these we must choose
our example of a woman of fashion as she should be.
On her, too, we will bestow a name — a name asso-
ciated with all gentle and benignant influences — the
name of her who in her shaded retreats received of old
the ruler of earth's proudest empire, that she might
" breathe off with the holy air" of her pure affection,
" that dust o' the heart" caught from contact with coarser
spirits. So have we dreamed of Egeria, and Egeria
shall be the name of our heroine. Heroine indeed, for

76 WOMAN ix AMERICA:

heroic must be her life. With eyes uplifted to a pro-
tecting Heaven, she must walk the narrow path of right,
— a precipice on either hand, — never submitting in her
lowliness of soul, to the encroachments of the selfish,
and eager, and clamorous crowd, — never bowing her
own native nobility to the dictation of those whom the
world styles great. " Resisting the proud, but giving
grace unto the humble," if we may without irrev-
erence appropriate to a mortal, words descriptive of
Him whose unapproachable and glorious holiness we are
exhorted to imitate.

In society, Egeria is more desirous to please than to
shine. Her associates are selected mainly for their
personal qualities, and if she is peculiarly attentive and
deferential to any class, it is to those unfortunates whom
poverty, the accidents of birth, or the false arrangements
of society, have divorced from a sphere for which their
refinement of tasT;e and manner and their intellectual cul-
tivation had fitted them. Admission to her society is
sought as a distinction, because it is known that it must
be purchased by something more than a graceful address,
a well-curled mustache, or the reputation of a travelled
man. At her entertainments, you will often meet some
whom you will meet nowhere else ; some promising

HER WORK AKD HER REWARD.

young artist, yet unknown to fame, — some who, once
standing in the sunshine of fortune, were well known to
many whose vision is too imperfect for the recognition of
features over which adversity has thrown its shadow.
The influence of Egeria is felt through the whole circle
of her acquaintance ; — she encourages the young to high
aims and persevering efforts, — she brightens the fading
light of the aged, but above all is she a blessing and a
glory within her own home. Her husband cannot look
on her — to borrow Longfellow's beautiful thought —
without " reading in the serene expression of her face,
the Divine beatitude, ' Blessed are the pure in heart.' "
Her children revere her as the earthly type of perfect
love. They learn even more from her example than her
precept, that they are to live not to themselves, but to
their fellow-creatures, and to God in them. She has so
cultivated their taste for all which is beautiful and noble,
that they cannot but desire to conform themselves to
such models. She has taught them to love their coun-
try and devote themselves to its advancement — not be-
cause it excels all others, but because it is that to which
God in his providence united them, and whose advance-
ment and true interest they are bound to seek by all just
and Christian methods. In a word, she has never for-

78 WOMAN iisr AMEEICA:

gotten that they were immortal and responsible beings,
and this thought has reappeared in every impression she
has stamped upon their minds.

But it is her conduct towards those in a social po-
sition inferior to her own, which individualizes most
strongly the character of Egeria. Remembering that
there are none who may not, under our free institu-
tions, attain to positions of influence and responsibility,
she endeavors, in all her intercourse with them, to
awaken their self-respect and desire for improvement,
and she is ever ready to aid them in the attainment
of that desire, and thus to fit them for the perform-
ance of those duties that may devolve on them.

" Are you not afraid that Bridget will leave you, if,
by your lessons, you fit her for some higher position ?"
asked a lady, on finding her teaching embroidery to a
servant who had shown much aptitude for it.

" If Bridget can advance her interest by leaving me,
she shall have my cheerful consent to go. God for-
bid that I should stand in the way of good to any
fellow- creature — above all, to one whom, by placing
her under my temporary protection, he has made it
especially my duty to serve," was her reply.

In the general ignorance and vice of the population

HEE WOEK AXD HEE EEWAED. 79

daily pouring into our country from foreign lands, Egeria
finds new reason for activity, in the moral and intellec-
tual advancement of all who are brought within her
sphere of influence.

Egeria has been accused of being ambitious for her
children. " I am ambitious for them," she replies ; " am-
bitious that they should occupy stations that may be
as a vantage-ground from which to act for the public

Notwithstanding this ambition, she has, to the aston-
ishment of many in her own circle, consented that one
of her sons should devote himself to mechanics. r She
was at first pitied for this, as a mortification to which
she must certainly have been compelled, by her hus-
band's singular notions, to submit.

"You mistake," said Egeria, to one who delicately
expressed this pity to her ; " my son's choice of a trade
had my hearty concurrence. I was prepared for it by
the whole bias of his mind from childhood. He will
excel in the career he has chosen, I have no doubt ; for
he has abilities equal to either of his brothers, and he
loves the object to which he has devoted them. As a
lawyer or physician he would, probably, have but added
one to the number of mediocre practitioners who lounge

80 WOMAN EST AMERICA I

through life with no higher aim than their own main-
tenance."

"But then," it was objected, "he would not have
sacrificed his position in society."

Egeria is human, and the sudden flush of indignation
must have crimsoned the mother's brow at this ; and
somewhat of scorn, we doubt not, was in the smile that
curled her lip as she replied, " My son can afford to lose
the acquaintance of those who cannot appreciate the true
nobility and independence of spirit which have made
him choose a position offering, as he believes, the highest
means of development for his own peculiar powers, and
the greatest probability, therefore, of his becoming use-
ful to others."

Our sketches are finished — imperfect sketches we ac-
knowledge them. It would have been a labor of love to
have rendered the last complete — to have followed the
steps of Egeria — the Christian gentlewoman — through at
least one day of her life ; to have shown her embellish-
ing her social circle by her graces of manner and charms
of conversation, and to have accompanied her from the
saloons which she thus adorned, to more humble abodes.
In these abodes she was ever a welcome as well as an
honored guest, for she bore thither a respectful consider-

HER WORK AXD HER REWARD. 81

ation for their inmates, which is a rarer and more coveted
gift to the poor than any wealth can purchase. Having
done this, we would have liked to glance at her in the
tranquil evening of a life well spent, and to contrast her
then with Flirtilla, old beyond the power of rouge, false
teeth, and false hair, to disguise — still running through
a round of pleasures that have ceased to charm, regret-
ting the past, dissatisfied with the present, and dreading
the future, alternately courting and abusing the world,
which has grown weary of her. But to stray into these
flowery paths of imagination, would lead us too far
away from a graver purpose, to which we return.

82 WOMAN ESr AMERICA

CHAPTER VII,

CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION.

As we have advanced in our argument, we have be-
come more and more convinced, that the difference be-
tween the civilization we are endeavoring to portray, and
that which has hitherto been the aim of nations the most
advanced in intellectual and even in religious culture, is,
that the former is a Christian civilization — a civilization
which moulds the spirit into shapes of grace and beauty,
and on these lays all external decorations, as a suitable
drapery ; — while the latter considers all spiritual educa-
tion as a thing apart from itself, and is satisfied to con-
ceal by a beautiful exterior the deformities which lie
deep within. Let us not be accused of saying, that all
nations before us have neglected spiritual education.
From the low roofs beneath which peasant mothers lull
their babes to sleep with Christian hymns, and from

HEE WOEK AND HEE EEWAED. 83"

gorgeous cathedrals, whose vaulted roofs reverberate
each day anthems of praise to the Most High, — from the
" ragged schools" in which outcast children have been
gathered by the most self-sacrificing philanthropists the
world ever saw, and from those spacious colleges which
have been for ages a nation's boast — would come voices
of denial to a dogma so absurd, illiberal, and untrue. It
is not of the lack of spiritual education in older lands
that we complain, but that it has been a thing apart from
their civilization, which might have been grafted as easi-
ly upon a Pagan as a Christian faith — nay, more easily,
for where their religion and their civilization have met,
they have met, not as friends, but as antagonists. Who
in London or Paris would be thought to have attained
to the highest degree of social refinement — she who,
respecting the sanctity of those hours which God had
marked as His own, and desiring to be " in the spirit on
the Lord's day," should refuse to spend the evening of
Saturday in amusements calculated to dissipate all seri-
ous thought, should make a point of conscience of a
regular attendance on the services of the sanctuary, and
of an earnest regard to those services — or she who
thinks of Saturday only as the best night for the opera,
and of Sunday as a day of ennui scarcely to be borne,

WOMAN ESr AMERICA :

were it not for the fashionable drive, more thronged on
that than on other days, and for the succession of visitors
whom she is too much engaged to receive during the
week?

That to which we would exhort our countrywomen, is,
to make the tree good that its fruit may be good, and its
flowers and foliage enduring in their beauty, because
sustained by an inner life. We would spare no true re-
finement, no external grace, from our plan of education.
The nicely modulated voice, whose subtle melody steals
sometimes to the heart wrapped in a thousand folds of
selfishness — the gentle grace that wins regard — the
modest dignity which commands respect from insolence
itself — we would have them all ; not as a dress to be
worn on state occasions, but as an inseparable part of
the person — the spontaneous developments of a living
spirit. We may be told, with a smile, that we are re-
vealing no new discovery in education, in thus marking
the desirableness of a harmonious cultivation of all the
powers — the spiritual as well as the physical — those of
thought and feeling as well as of expression. To such a
suggestion we would most respectfully reply, that the
education of which we speak, is not that of the school or
the pulpit, but that of society. And to produce such

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 85

results, our social life must be something more than
a wonderfully correct imitation, considering our small
means, of the imposing life of other lands — it must be a
true life, a being, not a seeming. Better the plainest and
lowliest being, whose unattractive form shrouds a li ring
spirit — who thinks, and speaks, and acts, from a self-
directing impulse. — than the loveliest statue ever mod-
elled by the hand of man, though the skill of the arti-
ficer may have added to its beauty the powers of the
automaton, in speech and action.

We have already endeavored to show what, even at
the risk of wearying our readers, we must repeat, that
the social arrangements we are imitating can only have
life in the soil over which feudalism once spread its
gigantic branches. They must be grafted on that stock
to flourish. There they still have life and meaning. In
countries whose population has increased beyond their
resources, or whose resources are so apportioned, that,
while the few live in a luxury we would vainly covet,
the many must toil from light to dark, for food and rai-
ment and shelter, there is meaning in those outward
shows, which mark more emphatically than any law
could do, to the brutish minds of the crowd, the majesty
of their rulers. Where there are various orders in a state,

8

86 WOMAN EST AMEEICA :

on whose preservation the safety of that state depends,
there is meaning and life even in the refinements and
courtesies of polite society, apart from the spirit of him
who practises them. These refinements and courtesies
say to the brutish herd : " You are not of us ; toil on
through your wearisome day, and when night comes,
sleep the unbroken sleep which comes only to the worker
— rarely indeed to the thinker. We to whom knowledge
has given power, we who bear about us, as you see, im-
pressed on our brows, speaking through our lips, and
manifesting itself in our every movement, the visible
signs of that power — we will think for you, fight for you,
and guard you from that anarchy, that universal war-
fare, into which, if deserted by us, in your ignorance and
your wretchedness, you must fall, and which is worse
than the worst despotism." And the more imposing the
forms under which the life of the upper classes presents
itself, the more impressive is the utterance of these dicta.
But where there is freedom, where the people are
their own rulers, society should assume a simpler aspect ;
for from the spirit of the people must it receive its char-
acter, so far as it is any thing more than a system of
dead forms, a mere automaton.

And now, are we, the women of America, prepared

HER WORK ASTD HER REWARD. 87

to say : "It shall be thus with us ; our social life
shall reflect the free, independent spirit of our people.
The old American life, noble in its simplicity, shall not
be stifled beneath a mass of foreign fripperies, meaning-
less to us at least. Understanding our mission, we
will, with God's help, perform it. Sacrificing no refine-
ment, relinquishing no grace, cherishing all the gentle
courtesies of life as expressions of its cordial sympa-
thies, we will not be tempted from the beautiful
simplicity of our mothers, by the follies of a little
circle of successful speculators — millionaires with heavy
purses and light heads, who having found even then-
wealth insufficient to maintain the expenses of fashionable
life in Europe, would establish a second-rate imitation of
it here. Wealth, and its gifts of dress and equipage,
shall not win us to countenance vice or to flatter folly.
The simplest garb and most retired home shall not veil
from our earnest search, or withdraw from our friendly
circle, those whose virtue, intelligence, and refinement,
make them worthy of our regard, and capable of sympa-
thizing with our own high objects. While we look cold-
ly upon those who would establish themselves in that
circle, upon no better claim than that of wealth, too new
to have won for its possessor even the superficial gloss

WOMAN IN AMERICA:

which sometimes veils innate vulgarity ; we will delight
"to hold dut a helping hand to the poor scholar, who,
with a mind rich in God's best gifts, is compelled to plod
his weary way along thoroughfares thronged Avith the
ignorant and the coarse, thirsting and thirsting in vain
for companionship with the refined and cultivated. We
will call to our side the gentle girl, who, even in the un-
congenial atmosphere to which poverty has condemned
her, cherishes her sympathies with all the refinements
that embellish our lives ; and, that these may stand be-
side us unshamed, we will keep those lives within the
limits of an elegant simplicity. Denying ourselves noth-
ing that will serve as means of culture, we will sacrifice,
if need be, to such treasures, the vulgar love for personal
decoration, or the mad search for gayeties, which would
ill assort with the untroubled serenity of minds dwelling
in a region elevated above the sensual. The generous
hospitalities which were wont to characterize our homes,
shall not be lessened, that we may appear in laces that a
queen might wear, or jewels that would become a birth-
night ball. A suit of diamonds shall have no charm for
us, in comparison with a picture or a statue bearing the
undying impress of the immortal mind from which it
sprang. We will tread on carpets less soft than those

HER WORK AXD HER REWARD. 89

woven by Persian looms, we will want the gilded cornice
and the fretted roof, we will consent to relinquish the*
indisputable elegance of rose-wood and or-molu, if, by
yielding these, we may secure that best room of -all in a
house, a spacious library, in which we may command at
will the noblest powers of the noblest men of every age
and every land — in which magic spells are stored, power-
ful to conjure before our dazzled vision scenes of such
splendor as would make the realities of many a royal
palace dim. Is or shall this be a selfish enjoyment. If,
by this disposal of our wealth, we have denied ourselves
the poor, mean triumph of outshining our neighbors in
some butterfly ball, or of assembling our dear five hun-
dred friends to gaze with envious hearts upon our tinsel
splendor, we will invite all of them who have minds to
prize our nobler treasures to enjoy them with us — espe-
cially will we bid to this ' feast of reason' those to whom
a less favoring destiny has denied the power of gratifying
such tastes. Thus, in our measure, will we work to cul-
tivate and refine all around us, and to produce that only
true equality, an equality of mind, without some ap-
proach to which a republic is a dream, and will pass like
a dream away."

Equality of mind ! Shall the workers of a nation —
8*

90 WOMAN IN AMERICA

the hard-handed men of toil become likewise men of
thought ? Here only of all the world — here, where labor
is so well rewarded, where the necessaries of life are so
easily obtained, and the diffusion of intelligence is so
general — may these characters be united and man stand
complete in. every faculty. Every thing here tends to
this desired consummation. Elihu Burritt has already
taught us what one laboring man can do ; while from our
factories have gone forth contributions to our literature,
conned amid the unceasing whirl of looms and spindles,
not less valuable, to say the least, than many of the
same class penned in the repose of the tasteful boudoir.
The labor which accomplishes its ends without becoming
so extreme as to exhaust the vital powers, stimulates our
mental faculties, and brings them into fuller and healthier
play. We shall have probably few learned pundits in
our land, few men who live a life dissevered from that of
the rest of the world — who would think more of the
discovery of a long missing Greek folio than of a new
continent — who would exult more at detecting in the
language of some modern nation an undoubted relation-
ship to that spoken ages ago in the forests of Germany,
on the shores of the Black Sea, or amid the sands of the
desert, than in catching the first notes of that hymn of

HER WORK AKD HEE REWARD. 91

universal freedom, which is one day to sound from shore
to shore, and by the thrill it wakes in every human
heart, to prove the brotherhood of all. Our learned
men must still be living men. No princely patrons or
rich endowments will enable them to live apart from
their fellows. They, too, must work and grow weary,
and refresh themselves at the fountain of all bright and
pure thoughts — home — the home of mother, sister, wife.
They, too, must learn through trial — through success
painfully bought and suffering patiently endured — to
sympathize with the common heart. Shall we mourn
this ? Shall we say, that with us, as there is no chief in
the political world, so there will be none in letters — that
in our land there will be no mountain peak from whose
glow the nations shall first hail the coming dawn ? To
this we have but one answer — it was precisely in such a
life of toil and suffering that Shakspeare and Milton
were formed.

It is only, as we believe, in such an amalgamation of
two classes hitherto held distinct — in such a fusing to-
gether, as it were, of labor with thought and refinement
— that we shall attain to the perfect type of man. Even
sinless man, over whose frame disease had no power,
was not left wholly idle. He had

92 WOMAIST E* AMERICA I

'• A pleasant labor, to reform
The flowery arbors and the alleys green"

of Eden. To sinful man the first award of Infinite Wis-
dom and Love was, " By the sweat of thy brow shalt
thou win thy bread ;" and who that has looked with an
observant eye find a reflecting mind on the face of the
earth, has not felt that it was Love which dictated this
award? "There is," says Carlyle, "a perennial noble-
ness and even sacredness in work." Heaven, we be-
lieve, is no place for the indulgence of sloth. Happy
spirits, we doubt not, work, though their work, like that
of the God-Man, is noble, and spiritual, and free, spring-
ing spontaneously from an impulse within, not constrained
by external circumstances. To this .we shall probably
never attain on earth ; but as we become elevated by in-
telligence and refinement, and, above all, by that love to
God and love to man, which is the culminating point of
all intelligence and all refinement, our work will doubt-
less make some approximation to the freedom, and the
joyousness, and the nobility of angels' work. Already
intelligence has done much to lessen the drudgery, the
brutalizing influence of excessive labor ; but the mechani-
cal arts through which this has been accomplished, have
been hitherto applied only to individual emolument ; — •

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 93

they have yet to receive a neAV and mightier impulse
from Christian benevolence — from the desire to elevate
to a nobler life, the whole human race.

We are not so Quixotic as to believe, that words of
ours may prevail on the idle children of luxury to take
their fair share of the world's labor, that their brothers
may not sink beneath the burden forced on them. Still
less can we hope to persuade them, that they would find
the law of labor, within certain limits, a beneficent law in
its action upon themselves. They would perhaps ask us,
Shall we reject the services of those who depend on our
payment of those services for bread, that we may have
work for ourselves ? We answer, Far from it ; we would
have you exact less for the payment you give, and make
up the lack of service by your own exertion. Thus
Avould you gain, perchance, health of mind and body,
and your brother man some of that time which would
be to him an invaluable boon, and which is to you often
an intolerable burden.

As we have said, however, we have no hope of pro-
ducing such an influence on the luxurious idler, and
we would not Avaste our energies on a hopeless task.
But there is another class, on the yet unhardened moulds
of Avhose characters and destinies we would fain flatter

94 WOMAN IN AMERICA I

ourselves that even our feeble words may fall with some
good effect. Few familiar with our social life, can have
failed to remark the number of young men among us
seeking work and finding none, because, while their
powers have never been trained to application in a de-
fined line, they are unwilling to apply them in the only
way in which undisciplined power may be used success-
fully— in real, manual labor. These young men are gen-
erally the sons of fathers possessing just wealth enough
to maintain what is called, under the false social system
we are combating, a genteel establishment. They have
been born in luxurious homes, which the death of the
father, and the consequent division of property, have dis-
mantled. They are now left with no means of securing
the expensive training necessary to the practice of either
of the learned professions, and with ideas of life which
forbid them to use their strength in the only way in
which they could make it available for their support.
Thus the best years of their lives — the very spring-tide
of their powers — is wasted in hopeless inaction, and all
manliness and independence of character is lost, while
they sue and cringe to this patron and to that for aid to
support their fading gentility, till, wearied by their im-
portunities and disgusted with their servility, the very

HER WORK AXD HER REWARD. 95

circle for which they have sacrificed all that was truly-
valuable in themselves, contemn and disown them.

To reform this great evil and to rectify those false
views from which it springs — woman — woman, especially
in that class which gives the tone to manners, may
greatly if not chiefly contribute. Let her show that, in
her opinion, labor imprints no brand upon the brow —
that there shall be, with her consent, no social ban upon
it — let her make her social life so simple that the laborer
may partake it, if he have acquired the refinement neces-
sary to place him in sympathy with it, and he will set
this before him as a new and most influential motive for
the exertion -of every faculty. Still more, in that house-
hold which is her own peculiar realm, let her endeavor
to awaken the dormant faculties of all around her. Let
her never deny to the workers there some leisure for the
cultivation of the spiritual part of their nature. Say
not, were this generally done, we should soon have no
servants. You will always have helpers in every depart-
ment of labor — for the poor we are assured we shall
have always with us — and the more intelligent and re-
fined these helpers, the better for us and for our chil-
dren. Perchance you smile at the idea of refinement as
connected with some acts of household necessity. Look

WOMAN IN AMEKICA I

abroad, scorner, over the length and breadth of the land,
and see in what has art of late so. manifested its power
as in. lessening the drudgery of the house-worker, and in
taking from her office all that was offensive to good taste
or incompatible with true refinement. We have ad-
verted to these mechanical improvements in all labor, as
promises of " a good time coming." It will surely come.
Let us, women of America, be its glad ushers. Not by
laying aside the distinctive character of our sex to enter
the halls of legislation, as petitioners or otherwise, — not
by banding into societies to debate and harangue on
social evils and their redress — shall we win this high
honor, but by ruling in the little realm of home, our
legitimate domain, in the spirit of wisdom and of love,
by cultivating every feminine grace and charm which
may secure for us a wide social influence, and by using
this influence to cemmend truth and holiness, to allay
the animosities of party and the prejudices of caste, and
to prore to the world that there is no civilization so high-
toned and of such true refinement, as that which is based
on Christian principles.

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 97

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WEST.

THE United States of America — how much is com-
prised in these few words ! How many varieties of life,
physical and spiritual! Here, forests seemingly inter-
minable, where gigantic trees clothe themselves in the
cheerful livery of spring, the full foliage of summer, the
russet hues of autumn, or present their leafless branches
to the tossings of the wintry tempests, with no human
eye to mark their changes, no human voice to interrupt
the harmony of their feathered songsters, and no human
foot to startle the squirrel from his feast, or to track to
his haunts the prowling wolf or savage bear; — there,
cities, which from their artificial life and closely-pressed
population, you might fancy coeval with the oldest of
the old world. Here, a people who, cast upon rugged
rocks, have become rugged as they, and forced from
stern nature wealth and luxury, making the stones which

9

98 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

she gave them for bread, build their houses, and com-
pelling the streams which would not float their ships to
turn their mill-wheels ; — there, a land whose soil scarce
needs the tillage of man to bring forth all that can charm
the eye or gratify the appetite, yet whose inhabitants
rarely obtain from it more than the necessaries of exist-
ence. Here, a territory whose dwellings stand ever
clustered around the church and the school -house ; —
there, a vast extent of country over which no Sabbath
bell has ever sounded, and where no schoolmaster has
yet gone abroad. Yet, over this country, so diverse in
its physical features and its moral aspect, there is still
one bond of unity. All its citizens are politically free
and independent ; all profess to be, in some sense —
though in what sense few of them perhaps understand —
equal. To all of them, therefore, we may say, as we
have said: "Your life must be moulded in other and
simpler forms than that of lands whose civilization' was
the child of feudalism, not of Christianity."

But there are circumstances connected with these di-
versified modes of life, which must greatly modify the
forms in each. Permit us to describe more minutely the
variations to "which each of these modes of life has al-
ready given rise, the evils to be dreaded in each, and, so

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 99

far as our insight extends, the manner in which those
evils may be avoided.

And first, of the West. Here we have a vast extent
of territory, the first danger of whose inhabitants has
been well defined by an able writer of our own land, to
be barbarism, or a loss both of civilization and of Chris-
tianity. Nor can any doubt that there is sufficient
cause for this fear, who casts an eye over this portion of
our country, with its habitations scattered here and
there at remote distances, and with no tie of mutual ad-
vantage holding together the dwellers in those habita-
tions, or binding them to one common centre. In the
most unmitigated form of this Western life, the single
habitation of the rude squatter or adventurous hunter,
ever receding before the advance of civilization, the evil
is immedicable by any specific that we can command.
But, here and there, over those pathless prairies, journeys
a group of settlers, leaving the smiling homesteads where
their childhood and youth have been passed in a life
simple but not altogether rude, in search of richer if not
happier fortunes in that far West which is the " land of
promise" to the American of the Atlantic coast. These
establish themselves on neighboring farms, in rude huts,
in which they live perchance for years, estranged from

100 WOMAN m AMEKICA :

all the customs and the comforts of their earlier life.
No Sabbath bell reminds them that there is a higher
nature within them to whose necessities one-seventh
part of their time has been devoted by their great Law-
giver ; no ambassador from God, no messenger of the
glad tidings of salvation, visits them in their comfortless
abodes. Even the intellectual powers that fit them for
the more successful pursuit of worldly objects, find there
no means of cultivation — for no school-house rises within
any convenient distance of their homes. The present,
with its stern demands, which will brook no delay,
presses away the memories of a former and happier life,
and drowns by its clamors the still, small voice which
would urge the claims of the future. They eat and
drink and perish, with little but those fading memories
to mark them as nobler than the brutes ; and they leave
their children to a life in which those memories have
already assumed the less influential character of tradi-
tions.

Permit us to pause here for a moment with a sugges-
tion which has often forced itself upon our hearts, while
contemplating the condition of these our countrymen and
countrywomen. It is this : how can any American seek
his field of missionary labor in the distant isles of the

HER WORK AND HEE EEWAED. 101

Pacific, in India, or China, or Africa, and leave thus,
within the borders of his own land, a people speaking
his own language, claiming a common parentage with
himself, " bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh," to lose
the light of the gospel, and sink back into darkness as
deep as that of any Pagan land? True, from those
distant parts of the earth voices are crying out to us in
tones well nigh irresistible for the bread of life; nor
would we resist the appeal — if we are Christians we
dare not, for our work, if we are followers of Christ, is
what his was, the salvation of the whole world. But
while we do this, let us take heed that we leave not the
other undone — that the neighbor at our door — the duty
nearest us — be not overlooked ! Ah ! will not Eng-
land and America learn, that to them, as to Israel of old,
it is commanded, ere they go forth to do battle against
the enemies of the Lord, and to overthrow the false gods
of the Heathen, to "put away" from themselves "every
wicked thinff." Let us educate and Christianize our own

O

people, that we may go forth with resistless power, even
with the power of the Most High, to bring the whole
earth into subjection to the truth which we have thus
acknowledged and obeyed.

But this is a subject which may be thought somewhat

9*

.»_

102 WOMAN IN AMERICA I

apart from our present design, and too high for our fee-
ble pens ; we turn, therefore, again to our own sex,
and to the more common forms of life. And even here,
in these western wilds, woman — and woman in the exer-
cise only of her acknowledged powers, in the fulfilment
of the sweet charities of home, as wife, mother, mistress
— may do much to promote the advance of Christian
civilization.

Not unfrequently the rude settlement formed by some
band of Eastern emigrants, whose whole capital could
do little more than purchase the land on which they built
their huts, has been made in a spot possessing such ad-
vantages of position as to tempt others, with somewhat
more capital, to plant their habitations near them. The
unsuccessful merchant, and the professional man of expen-
sive habits, who, having married early, finds his family
increasing more rapidly than the means of supporting
them in a land in which his class is already too numerous,
look longingly to the West, where they may, without the
humiliation of a descent in the social scale, assume a
mode of life more simple and better suited to their re-
duced incomes. Too often, we grieve to say it, the
consent of the wife to this removal is an enforced consent
— and even where it is otherwise, where it is given from

HER WOEK AXD HEK REWARD. 103

an intelligent conviction of the wisdom of such a measure,
and a profound sympathy with the disappointments and
the hopes of her husband, there is often, we fear, no
consciousness of any duty on her part but endurance,
cheerful as she can make it, of what she regards as
the inevitable evils of her lot. Alas! she has yet to
learn that, " to be still, sometimes demands immeasurably-
higher power than to act." It is only while we are ac-
tively engaged in efforts to meliorate suffering and to
overcome evil, whether physical or moral, that we can
cheerfully endure its presence. Let every Christian
woman thus borne westward by influences over which she
has no control, recognise in these influences the hand of
Providence, and ask herself, What work has God here
for me ? and we shall have fewer instances of families
driven back, through the discontent of the wife and
mother, from the abodes which were just beginning to
assume something of the aspect of homes, and from the
property just beginning to repay the first expense of its
settlement and the cares lavished upon it, wisely, but
vainly. She comes — the unhappy wife — with her beauty
faded by unaccustomed labor and privation, and the
buoyancy of her spirit broken, and the serenity of her
temper clouded by many cares ; and the world, that

104 WOMAN ET AMERICA I

wise judge, exclaims — " How cruel it is, to take a woman
of refinement, who has been accustomed to all the com-
forts of civilized life, to {-he West !"

Sad sentence, this, if it be a true one, for it condemns
that fair and fertile region, whose wide extent and rich
resources give promise of power and wealth greater than
those of all the rest of our confederacy, to the loss of
those influences which will most successfully combat its
present tendency to barbarism. While political econo-
mists are arguing on the danger to our institutions of the
rapid increase of a foreign population in our land, and
statesmen are planning checks and balances to this evil,
the resistless flood is still rolling Westward — the roaring
of its mighty wave breaking the silence of the prairies,
over which for ages only the Indian moved with stealthy
step, while the very winds seemed there to hush them-
selves to softer whisperings. There, Europe is pouring
out her pent-up thousands. The overwrought children
of toil from England and Scotland — the starving peasant-
ry of Ireland, with then- quick wit, and wild, reckless
impulses — the Swiss, the German, the Dane, the Swede —
all are there waiting the influences which are to fashion
them into a terrible engine of destruction to a government
which can rest securely only on the intelligence and virtue

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 105

of its people, or to mould them into the choicest pillars
of our Temple of Freedom. And shall we lightly reject
in such a work the silent, but most powerful, influence of
woman? Shall she, who might soften the rude, and
tame the fierce, and harmonize the discordant elements
of character, be forbidden to approach them? Rather
let us rejoice to see our noblest and our best bending
-their steps thitherward, if they have minds to grasp the
work that lies before them, physical powers to endure its
demands, and hearts to give themselves to a noble cause
in self-denying effort. All these will, we doubt not, be
needed ; therefore, let no woman, without counting the
cost, consent to undertake this mission, for a sacred mis-
sion it must be to her. Before she enters on it, let her
be assured that she has the true refinement which can
sustain itself unharmed in the simplest life; an innate
dignity which, dispensing with all the shows and trap-
pings of a vain and selfish luxury, may still be intact in
its essential grace. Fatigue she must doubtless endure,
arid therefore the need of physical vigor. To these at-
tributes, she will require to add such a knowledge of all
household economy, as shall make her not absolutely
dependent upon hired services for the comforts of her
home.

106 WOMAN IN AMERICA:

" Not dependent upon hired services ! What ! would
you have j, lady cook and wash ?" — me thinks we hear
some astonished reader exclaim. Certainly not, we reply,
if she can avoid it ; but we would have her know how to
perform even these offices if necessary ; for we contend it
is better to cook a dinner than to want one, and better,
and more lady -like even, to wash our own clothing, than
to wear it unclean. The last is a labor, however, which
requires the strength of practised muscles, and might be
found impossible to unaccustomed hands, were it not for
the aid of those mechanical arts, to whose benign influ-
ence on social life we have already alluded.

Let us say to those who hear with scorn of ladies
so engaged, that we have known, even here, the fair
daughter of luxury who had been delicately reared, in
anticipation of a life that should be as a fairy dream,
suddenly driven from her home of affluence to one of*
poverty; and never did we so value the accomplish-
ments which were intended to give a new charm to
the promise of her earlier days, as when we saw them
cheering and brightening, not herself only, but all who
dwelt within the shadow of her darkened life. Never
have we found beauty so alluring or grace so winning,
as when we have seen them employed in the homeliest

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 107

labors, and learned thus how much they might do to
win for labor the respect which is its due, and to ele-
vate the laborer even in his own esteem. Yet, we may
add, there would probably be less necessity for the per-
formance of these labors, in their Western homes, by
those to whom they are an untried and therefore a for-
midable exertion, if they would seek the aid of their
neighbors in the wilderness, in the spirit of those who
ask an interchange of kindly offices from their equals,
rather than of those who purchase the services of their
inferiors. Remember, that the unlettered woman to
whom you apply yourself with -such an air of hauteur,
has yet to learn the value of that cultivation on which
you found your claim to superiority — that of the accom-
plishments which are your boast she knows nothing,
while she sees you ignorant of those arts which are of
prime necessity in your present life — the only life with
which she is acquainted. Can you wonder that she is
slow to perceive and acknowledge herself your inferior ?
Nay, the fact of superiority or inferiority may bear a de-
bate from whatever point we take our view, while we
look only at the relative accomplishments and acquire-
ments of the two parties. Yours we admire most, per-
haps, but we can live without them ; hers are of prime

106 WOMAN IN AMERICA:

" Not dependent upon hired services ! What ! would
you have j, lady cook and wash ?" — methinks we hear
some astonished reader exclaim. Certainly not, we reply,
if she can avoid it ; but we would have her know how to
perform even these offices if necessary ; for we contend it
is better to cook a dinner than to want one, and better,
and more lady -like even, to wash our own clothing, than
to wear it unclean. The last is a labor, however, which
requires the strength of practised muscles, and might be
found impossible to unaccustomed hands, were it not for
the aid of those mechanical arts, to whose benign influ-
ence on social life we have already alluded.

Let us say to those who hear with scorn of ladies
so engaged, that we have known, even here, the fab-
daughter of luxury who had been delicately reared, in
anticipation of a life that should be as a fairy dream,
suddenly driven from her home of affluence to one of*
poverty; and never did we so value the accomplish-
ments which were intended to give a new charm to
the promise of her earlier days, as when we saw them
cheering and brightening, not herself only, but all who
dwelt within the shadow of her darkened life. Never
have we found beauty so alluring or grace so winning,
as when we have seen them employed in the homeliest

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 107

labors, and learned thus how much they might do to
win for labor the respect which is its due, and to ele-
vate the laborer even in his own esteem. Yet, we may
add, there would probably be less necessity for the per-
formance of these labors, in their Western homes, by
those to whom they are an untried and therefore a for-
midable exertion, if they would seek the aid of their
neighbors in the wilderness, in the spirit of those who
ask an interchange of kindly offices from their equals,
rather than of those who purchase the services of their
inferiors. Remember, that the unlettered woman to
whom you apply yourself with -such an ah- of hauteur,
has yet to learn the value of that cultivation on which
you found your claim to superiority — that of the accom-
plishments which are your boast she knows nothing,
while she sees you ignorant of those arts which are of
prime necessity in your present life — the only life with
•which she is acquainted. Can you wonder that she is
slow to perceive and acknowledge herself your inferior ?
Nay, the fact of superiority or inferiority may bear a de-
bate from whatever point we take our view, while we
look only at the relative accomplishments and acquire-
ments of the two parties. Yours we admire most, per-
haps, but we can live without them ; hers are of prime

108 WOMAN EST AMEBICA I

necessity. The true superiority of yours consists in their
power to enlarge the boundaries of thought and feeling
— to give you sources of happiness elevated above all
the accidents of your present condition. If they have
done this for you, your superiority will soon assert itself,
and be acknowledged without any trouble on your part.
The cultivation which gives you command of temper
under all the trials of your life, the accomplishments
which communicate somewhat of grace and elegance to
your rude home, and which make you courteous and
kindly to the untutored beings around you, cannot fail in
time to win their respect, and even to inspire them with
the desire to emulate in some degree what they admire.
We can scarcely hope, indeed, to excite this latter feel-
ing in the breasts of those who have grown old in such
different habits. But the sapling may yield to the force
which will not suffice to bend the stalwart oak. The
young will be there, whose quick affections and eager
faculties are so quickly won to love, admire, and imitate ;
and when you have thus influenced them, how noble
will be your work — how great your reward ! The
brightening aspect of the homes around you, the purer
tastes and gentler manners of the dwellers in those
homes will be as a perpetual blessing to you. Do you

HER WORK AN1> HER REWARD. 109

ask any other reward ? You will find it in the increased
value of your own home — in the conviction that you
may dwell in it without fear of coarse and brutalizing
associations for your children — that by interesting them
in your own holy work, you may even find there more
fully than in more advanced societies the proper stimulus
for all in them which is " pure and lovely and of good
report." And with these " dearer and home-felt de-
lights" may mingle the sweet thought, that silently, un-
seen, like the rill which steals along, marking its course
only by the verdure to which it supplies a richer green
and more luxuriant beauty, you have done more real
good to your country, more to insure the continuance of
institutions depending on the intelligence and virtue of
her people, than all the demagogues who ever harangued
in or out of Congress.

10

110 WOMAN IN AMEKICA

CHAPTER IX,

THE SOUTH.

THE South ! the sunny South ! The land where the
snow-spirit never comes, where the forest-trees are
never stripped of their green coronal, where Spring
flings her flowers into the very lap of Winter ! Let us
stand beneath her soft skies, inhale the perfume of her
myrtle-bowers and orange-groves, press her violet-cov-
ered turf, and weave fragrant wreaths of the jessamine
which flings its yellow clusters so gracefully from tree
to tree. Or, if you would look on nature in a soberer
dress, we will walk through her forests of pine, and listen
to the whispering of the winds as they pass over them ;
or we will stand beneath the giant oaks, from whose
branches a gray, mossy drapery hangs waving in the
summer breeze, while the ocean wave breaks with a
lulling murmur at our feet. To eyes accustomed to

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. Ill

bolder views — to precipitous rocks and lofty mountains,
and all the pleasing variety of hill and dale — these beau-
ties may seem tame, yet no true lover of nature can look
long without some melting of the heart, upon that rich
and varied foliage, that flowery earth, and those ever
sparkling, ever dancing waters. Theirs is not the beauty
which strikes with sudden, overpowering admiration, but
they steal not less surely to the heart ; and when, bruised
and worn with the conflicts of life, we shrink from great
emotions and long only for repose, the memory of their
peaceful loveliness comes back on our spirits, with an in-
fluence soothing as that of the mother's smile which
lulled our infancy to rest.

It will be evident to those acquainted with the physical
features of our country, that we have been describing
only the Atlantic coast of the Southern States ; for as we
advance into the interior, the face of the country becomes
more broken, and rises to greater elevation, until, at the
distance of less than one hundred miles from the sea, the
Alleghany rears its lofty summits. A noble country is
this interior — its aspect wild and picturesque, its soil fer-
tile, and its mineral wealth unbounded ; but it is yet, like
the West, in that state of transition which offers few
distinctive features to the observers of moral and social

112 WOMAN LN" AMERICA:

life. New settlers are still migrating thither from the
North and East, bearing with them the impressions and
habits of their former homes ; and it will probably be
long before they are welded together in one homogeneous
mass. But on the Southern seacoast, we have a social
life which has existed nearly as long as any in our land,
and which is marked by peculiar characteristics, the re-
sult of peculiar institutions.

In sketching the circumstances under which the ear-
liest settlements in these United States were made, we
did not allude to one element introduced into Southern
life, and Southern life alone. It is one, in truth, which
we would fain have avoided altogether, for its very name
has been of late years a signal for strife. But to write
of the South and say nothing of slave-labor, were indeed
— to borrow the words of John Randolph, on another
subject — " to give the tragedy of Hamlet, with the part
of Hamlet omitted ;" for from this domestic institution
does the South derive many of those traits which have
given her a distinctive character, and assigned to her a
distinctive part in the great drama acting in this land.
We have seen that in every part of our country the pros-
perity of the colonists began only when they threw off
their dependence on their foreign patrons ; but ere this

HEE WOEK AND HEE EEWAED. 113

had been done, those patrons had, in some instances,
accomplished plans whose influence, for good or for evil,
is still felt by us. Such was the act introducing African
laborers, as slaves, into the Southern colonies. Vainly
did the colonists protest against this act — vainly seek its
annulment by the Board of Directors hi England. Wise
men were those who formed that board ! Did the future
unroll itself before their wondering eyes ? Did they see,
far down the tide of time, those feeble colonies become a
great nation, no longer bringing tribute to England, or
accepting laws from her ; and did a mocking laugh rise
to their lips as they heard their own sons — the sons of
those by whose command, if not by whose very hands,
the African^vas brought to America, and condemned to
his life-bondage — the sons of those either in England or
in New England who received all the gain of this infa-
mous traffic, branding as men-stealers the children of the
very men now petitioning to be delivered from the incu-
bus of slavery ? Strange things must the angels see in
this our world ! But we are nearing the abyss of strife
— we feel its hot fires burning on our brow and kindling
a flame in our heart, and we gladly turn from the acts of
men, inconsistent, vacillating, and unjust, to those of the
all-perfect One, "with whom is no variableness nor
10*

114 WOMAN IN AMEEICA :

shadow of turning ;" and we think it will not be difficult
to prove from the annals of African slavery in this land,
that He has made the wrath of man to praise Him —
transmuting, with heavenly alchemy, the loathsome self-
ishness and heartlessness of the slave-trader into the
partial civilization and Christianization of the race en-
slaved, and into the means of promoting the intellectual
culture and social refinement of those who were forced
into the position of their masters.

The improvement of the African race among us is
sufficiently attested by the contrast which even the slaves
in our Southern States present, to the specimens of the
same race occasionally recaptured from some slave-ship

and brought to our shores, some forty or fifty years ago.

vt

And now, yearly, many of this oppressed and much-
wronged people are returning to their own land, bearing
with them the seeds of all that has made us what we are.
They went forth weeping, and they return bearing pre-
cious sheaves. The foul spirits which haunted the shores

of Africa have been exorcised ; Christian temples are

•
rising there, and around those temples are clustered the

habitations of civilized men, , from which the voice of
prayer and praise ascends to Heaven like the evening
and the morning incense.

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 115

In proof of our second proposition, that the introduc-
tion of slavery into the United States had been made to
subserve the promotion of intellectual culture and social
refinement among ourselves, we will refer the reader to a
work by one who cannot be suspected of favoring slavery
— Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford. The argument to which
we allude is contained in a sermon, published by him
some months since, entitled, " Barbarism our first dan-
ger." He there asserts that, in colonization, the colony
must always retrograde from the civilization of the
parent-land, since little time can be spared for the refine-
ments of iife, by those who are engaged in a hand-to-
hand contest with nature for the indispensable requisites
of existence. From the action of this law, however, he
confesses that those colonies in our land into which slave-
labor was introduced, were comparatively free. There,
the owner of property, having his land tilled by other
hands, had leisure for the cultivation of his mind, and
the practice of all the gentle courtesies of life. His
gains, too, were immediate, and he was thus able to
command the means of sending his sons to England for
their education, while the youth of other portions of our
land were educated at native schools and by native
teachers. Was not the great prominence of our South-

118 WOMAN IN AMERICA :

should the gentle care of woman not be withdrawn from
the home of the slave. She should be there to interpose
the shield of her charity between the weak and the strong,
to watch beside the sick, to soothe the sorrowing, to teach
the ignorant, to soften by her influence the haughty mas-
ter, and to elevate the debased slave. We know that there
are women — women in the often misrepresented South,
who have lived and do live for such objects. They will
have their reward ; their names may be cast out as evil in
the world, but " they shall be found written in the Lamb's
book of life." Such should be the life of eveiy Southern
woman. She is a missionary to whose own door God
lias brought the Pagans to be instructed. Ah ! could
she but understand all her mission, could she possess her
soul in patience in the midst of the warring elements
which surround her — could she pour the oil of her own
loving and gentle thoughts upon the raging waters of
strife, winning the fiery natures around her to see the
good even in their enemies, to adopt wise counsel even
though it come mingled with bitter taunt, to foster the
rare magnanimity which will not be withheld from a
right action by the apprehension that a foe may regard
it as a concession — could she induce, or even strive to in-
duce them to do all this — exercising her influence, not by

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 119

public associations, and debates, and petitions, but in the
manifestation of all feminine grace, and all womanly deli-
cacy— she would prove herself indeed, what one of old
named her, the connecting link between man and the
angelic world.

On Southern plantations the houses are generally of
wood, large and commodious, but built with little regard
to elegance, and furnished with a simplicity which would
shock the eye of a third-rate votary of fashion in a
Northern city. In these simple homes, however, you
may enter without fear; "stranger" is there a sacred
name ; and you will fin'S youself entertained with an
open-hearted hospitah'ty which may well reconcile you
to the absence of some accustomed luxuries. In the
dwellers in these homes, you will find generally the easy,
courteous bearing which distinguishes the best society
everywhere. In them, too, you will often find the high-
est intelligence in the land ; and it will be readily per-
ceived, that the result of this attainment of high cultiva-
tion in the inartificial life of the country, must be the
formation of a character uniting, in a rare degree, refine-
ment and simplicity. To this union, we think, Southern
women are indebted for that charm so generally at-
tributed to their manner — a charm which is never felt

120 WOMAN IN AMERICA :

so fully as in their own homes, where all around them
wears the impress of their own spirits. In the life they
lead, there is little of moment but personal qualities.
The fact that the changes of property are less 'frequent
and violent in an agricultural than in a commercial
country — that families remain longer in their relative
positions in the first than in the last — has given, it is
true, a higher value to blood, — to family distinction, —
at the South than at the North, yet scarcely sufficient
to affect the reception of an individual in society. The
true gold of character will there pass current, even
though it may lack "the guinea stamp."

Yet, even in this life, simple, unostentatious as it is, we
find some vestiges of the old feudalism. One of these
vestiges we recognise in the universal contempt for labor
— not perhaps in itself considered, but as pursued for gain.
A GENTLEMAN may labor, he may be his own blacksmith
or carpenter, if such be his taste, but he must make it evi-
dent that it is his taste — that he has no ulterior design to
profit by his labors — if he would not lose caste. Were
this prejudice entertained only against such rude employ-
ments as we have named, however, we could scarcely
represent it as characteristic of the South. The hard-
handed mechanic, however intelligent and even polite, is

HER WOEK AND TTEK REWARD. 121

as completely shut out from the pale of good society
everywhere ; but at the South, even the merchant finds
himself somewhat slightly regarded, because engaged in
a money-getting occupation. This has doubtless been
the result of that severance of the natural connection be-
tween property and labor which has obtained at the
South, and in which lies the very essence of feudalism.
Through this, the association of otium cum dignitate
was established and has been perpetuated- at the South.
Through this, the military profession has been honored
there, even as in European countries in old feudal times.
Next in dignity stands the legal profession, the great
nursery of statesmen in our land ; then the clerical and
medicaj professions; while the life of elegant leisure
which the resources of a few enable them to lead, is re-
garded as equal or superior to any of these in the social
pooition it confers.

In the Northern and Middle States, an idle man seems
in an awkward position, as the world of his acquaintance
is hurrying by him ; he must assume a bustling manner,
that he may, at least, seem to be employed. At the
South, he stands in an attitude of graceful repose, and
looks with conscious superiority upon the workers around
him. But this state of things cannot endure. Every
11

122 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

day, and in every place, the conviction is becoming more
decided, that this is a working world. There is work
here for each and all, and he who does not his own
share, makes his brother's burden by so much the
heavier. Work ! though it be only to improve your own
land ; and if you work successfully, the world has be-
come so much richer by your labors. Especially in a
country professedly republican, can no wise or conscien-
tious man retnain an idler. Do you really Value your
country, her freedom, her intelligence? Awake, slug-
gard ! lift up your eyes, and see how the darkness from
other lands is overshadowing her intelligence — how the
oppressed multitudes of other nations, escaping from their
galling bonds, threaten, in their wild transports, t/p tram-
ple freedom under foot, and to introduce in her place the
anarchy which has ever ended, and must ever end in
despotism. Here are the ignorant to be taught, the
weak to be guided, the vicious to be reclaimed. Up,
then, and be doing ! — while a school or a church is
needed in the remotest district, you have something for
which to labor. We feel persuaded that even in the
South, the listless repose of the idle will not long con-
tinue undisturbed. Changes have already taken place
there which betoken the infusion of new elements into its

HEE WORK AND HER REWARD. 123

indolent poco-curante life. These elements are, we be-.
lieve, the overflowing of the ever-boiling and bubbling
caldron of life in the New England and Middle States.
A happy admixture will this be, if the South will receive
strength and activity, and give refinement, without suffer-
ing simplicity to be lost in the exchange.

Changes, we repeat, have already taken place at the
South. Manufactories have been erected there, mines
have been worked, and railroads opened, in almost every
available direction. Should the prejudice against labor
continue in its full force at the South, these newly-
opened sources of wealth must fall into the hands of the
strangers who first found the key to them, and the old
proprietors be overshadowed till they die out of the* soil
which gave them birth. But of this we have little fear.
We do not think that any part of our country can much
longer remain unenlightened on the beneficence, the true
nobleness of labor, nay, of labor for money, since in
money lies the germ of all the good we may dp, as well
as of that we may enjoy. We will suppose all error on
this subject to have been rectified, and Southern society
to have become an industrious, active, energetic, money-
getting society. Then arises another, and, to us, not less
interesting question. Will it, in acquiring the virtues of

124 WOMAN IK AMEEICA :

the North, retain its own? Will its members, while
adding to their homes the mechanical improvements
which minister to comfort, and the treasures of art
which at once form and gratify the taste — while thus
gaining all that is truly valuable in the most advanced
. civilization, still wisely refuse to. exchange their simple,
social habits for the ostentatious display and vulgar
pretension which too often mark a sudden increase of
wealth ? If they do, if maintaining their simplicity of
life, they awake to a sense of their responsibility to God
and to the world for the improvement and proper use of
every talent entrusted to them, if they become " workers
with God," seeking wealth,

:*?'*>

" Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant —
But for the glorious privilege"

of opening to others a nobler life, of elevating to the
dignity of men their own dependants, of sending the
purifying streams of Christian education through the
land — that, each man learning he is the brother of all,
the bitter prejudices of sect and party may be discarded,
and our country, our whole country, become what God
intended it to be, united in one spirit, as well as in one

IIEK WORK AND HER REWARD. 125

body : if they do all this, then will they have attained to
our conception of a true American life.

And has woman at the South nothing to do in pro-
moting this " consummation most devoutly to be wished ?"
It must be mainly her work. Let her place it before her
as an object of her life. Let her improve every gift and
cultivate every grace, that the increased influence thus
obtained may aid in its accomplishment. Let her light
so shine that it may enlighten all who come within her
sphere. Let her be a teacher of the ignorant, a guide to
the straying of her own household. Let her make it a
law of the social life in which she rules, that nothing so
surely degrades a man as idleness, and the vices to which
it almost inevitably leads. Thus will she proclaim the
dignity and worth of labor, and she will find her reward
in the new impress made on the yet ductile minds of her
children. She has seen them hitherto too often go forth
like bright but wandering stars, into a life containing for
them no definite object. In this vast void, she has seen
them too often driven hither and thither by their own
reckless impulses ; and her heart has been wrung, and
her imploring cry has arisen to Heaven for God's re-
straining grace, as they have seemed about to rush into
the unfathomable realm of night. With almost Spartan
11*

126 WOMAN IN AMEBICA I

heroism she has offered her " Te Deums," as again and

again the sound has come up to her from the battle-field

' 9*
of life — "Mother! all is lost, but honor!" But labor

•will tame these wild impulses — will give to life a decided
aim ; and, as the strong hand, loosed from the bonds of
prejudice, obeys the command of the stout heart, her
" paeans" will be sounded, not for defeat nobly sustained,
but for victory won. We have placed before her, her
work and her reward.

HEE WORK AND HER REWARD. 127

CHAPTER X,

THE NORTH-EASTERN AND MIDDLE STATES.

FROM the boundless prairie and the pathless forest of
the West, with all their sublime associations, their touch-
ing reminiscences of an empire past, their grand promise
of a nobler empire yet to come ; — from the South, with
its quiet loveliness of broad rivers, flowing with gentle
noiseless current through valleys clothed with all the
exuberance of vegetation common to those lands which
lie nearest the sun; — from the rude strength of the
one and the refined simplicity of the other, — from these
pictures of life so different, and each so complete in itself,
we turn to the North and East, and for a time all before
us seems a great kaleidoscope of ever-shifting forms and
colors, without plan or definite arrangement. Bustling
crowds are moving hither and thither across the area of
our vision, jostling and even trampling each other ; but
by what spirit are they impelled ? — what object are they
pursuing ? — to what bourne are they speeding ?

128 WOMAN EST AMEKICA :

The rapid variations of fortune resulting from com-
mercial enterprise, have a tendency to engender feverish
dreams and wild speculations. Life, under such circum-
stances, becomes a great game of chance. Men move
through its shifting scenes with knitted brows, and throb-
bing pulses, and anxious hearts, like those who feel that
the next throw of the dice, or turn of the wheel of for-
tune may place them at the summit on which all eyes
are fastened, and to which all efforts are straining, or
may cast them down to the very foot of that eminence
up which they have been toiling for weary years. And
it is by this spirit — the anxious, self-absorbed spirit of
the gamester — that the movements of most men here
are impelled. We say, of most men, for we believe
there are few comparatively who hold themselves aloof
from mercantile speculation in some of its forms. The
lawyer, the physician, and even the divine, if we mistake '
not, has often the product of years of labor placed, not
where, guarded with unquestionable security, it may
bring to him a moderate interest, but in some popular
stock, or surprisingly lucrative business, where, at some
acknowledged hazard, it promises to double, or treble, or
quadruple itself in an incredibly short time.

And what is the object pursued, with such ard&r ? Is

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 129

it gold alone ? Are these men indeed so sordid that
they are willing to bury all the nobler parts of their
nature in shining dust ? No ; gold is not their ultimate
object. Gold is but the representative of that distinc-
tion which man everywhere craves, and which under our
present social arrangements can be obtained ordinarily
only through wealth.

The tone of feeling which prevails in the New England
and Middle states, in regard to labor, seems more de-
cidedly American than we have found it elsewhere.
The idler is viewed with little respect. Each man has,
or seeks to have, a work to do — at least the exceptions
to this remark are so few, that they serve, by the obser-
vation they excite, to prove the rule. Yet it is here that
the influence of the old feudal life is most powerfully
manifested — here that the most slavish subjection to
European customs is found. "You talk of despotism
abroad," said an intelligent foreigner to a friend, after a
residence of a few months in this part of our country;
"there is no despotism like that of fashion in America."
Having adopted foreign lawgivers, we seem to have re-
tained no discretionary power over their edicts. Did this
affect only our outer life — the form of our dresses and our
furniture, our style of. architecture and our carriages — we

130 WOMAN IN AMEKICA :

should say nothing, unless indeed we adverted to it to
express our thanks to those who, by the exercise of their
powers on these necessary yet not very important ar-
rangements of social life, had left ours free for other and
higher objects. But this is not all. Not a folly, or even
a vice, is tolerated abroad, in what are called the higher
circles, but it finds" apologists and imitators here. He
who has spent years enough abroad to divest himself of
all that Avas American about him — who returns hither
only because his exhausted finances Avill not support his
extravagances in other lands — becomes at once " the
glass of fashion and the mould of form." Our good
plain English, the language suiting men of sound prac-
tical minds and true feeling, is exchanged for a jargon of
various tongues, and American wives and daughters
grow ashamed in his presence, of then- power to make
home comfortable as well as gay, ashamed of all which
makes their true glory and excellence. The result of
this is often a compromise, awkward and inharmonious
as compromises ordinarily are, between the American
characteristics early acquired, and the foreign graces
grafted upon them. It cannot, we hope, be supposed
for a moment, that we are so illiberal, so ignorant, and
unjust, as to stigmatize all which is foreign as evil. There

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 131

is one even now amongst us, who has taught us that
home, with its cares and its joys, is in Sweden, as in
America, the sanctuary of true and warm affections, the
nursery of pure and high thoughts. But let it be re-
membered that we do not obtain the better aspects of
social life abroad — not the home-life — from the sources
to which Ave have alluded — and while there is not a nation
in Europe from which we would not gladly receive
lessons — not one which we would not be proud to re-
semble in some of its characteristics — we would still
preserve an independent mind, free to try all, to judge
all, and to hold fast only that which is good. We would
take an intelligent view of our own position, and of the
objects for which we exist as a separate people, and we
would adopt nothing which would unfit us for that posi-
tion, or shackle us in the attainment of those objects.

We have been accustomed to speak of that nation as
having attained to the highest civilization, in which the
greatest advance had been made in the cultivation of and
provision for the physical nature, though the advantages
thus gained were enjoyed only by a few. But this is a
civilization to which a Pagan land might equally have
attained ; it is not the civilization to which a nation whose
corner-stone was laid on the basis of a pure Christian

132 WOMAI* IN AMEKICA:

faith should aspire. Let it be our boast, that we have
placed the spiritual above the physical — that though
our houses may want some conveniences and luxuries
common abroad, though our theatres and our operas
may be less magnificent than those of other lands — our
schools and our churches are more numerous and better
supported. Let us acknowledge that the outward graces
of life, and what we are accustomed to term the accom-
plishments of education, are found in higher perfection
with a fortunate few abroad, than with us. We may
willingly consent to postpone any effort to compete with
their possessors, while we are engaged in the nobler task
of educating the spiritual natures of all the dwellers in
our land— of pouring light on the benighted minds, and
clothing with "the beauty of holiness" the debased
spirits sent to us from countries boasting, and boasting
justly, their higher civilization. We do not undervalue
this civilization. We are not blind to the grace of form
or the splendor of coloring, or deaf to the charms of
music, or insensible to the thousand luxuries it has intro-
duced. We rejoice to see some in our own land achieve
for themselves by successful industry, the power of com-
manding these luxuries. We look with pleasure, nay,
with somewhat of honest pride on the success of our

HEB WORK A?TD HER REWARD. 133

countrymen, on the stately dwellings rising around us.
We mark with satisfaction the improvements in architec-
tural taste, and the advances in all that may minister to
comfort. Especially do we take delight in finding in
these dwellings objects for the gratification of the higher
tastes, the creations of the qhisel and the pencil, lifting
us into communion with the artist in his moments of in-
spiration, and those silent counsellors, books, in which
are treasured the wisdom of ages. No cloud dims our
satisfaction in the observation of these acquisitions, till
we see that their possessor regards them as having trans-
muted his common clay into the fine porcelain of earth,
— that, from the height to which he has attained, he
looks down on those struggling, even as he did but a
few short years ago, not to cheer them by his example,
not to extend to them a helping hand, but to depress
them by his insolent assumption, and to provoke them to
an unwise and ruinous expenditure in the assertion of
that equality which he is so ready to deny. It is to this
last influence of the arrogant spirit which sudden eleva-
tion awakens in a vulgar mind, that we owe our most
urgent social evils. From this it proceeds that almost
all in our large cities live, if not beyond, at least to the
utmost extent of their incomes. To this we may trace
12

134 WOMAN LN" AMEIIICA :

the anxious faces we meet ever and again in our walks ;
to this, the fretful tempers which have driven peace from
the once happy family; to this, the ruined health of
women whose cheerful smiles once made the sunlight of
their homes. We do not mean that this influence is evi-
dent to the consciousness of each who thus suffers from
it. Many of these sufferers would, we doubt not, indig-
nantly deny its control over their actions. They will tell
you they but do what is common for others in their cir-
cumstances; they ask not what gave the impetus to
those who began this fearful race — this dance of death,
as it has proved to so many. But will not their secret
hearts bear witness, that they do submit to much wear-
ing anxiety, and even to great sacrifices of personal com-
fort, which they might avoid if they were willing to
occupy less spacious apartments, to tread on carpets of
more homely texture, and to sit at tables where the
equally bounteous, perhaps the more bounteous meal,
was served in less costly dishes ?

Permit us, in illustration of this subject, to present a
sketch of what is happening every day in our midst. A
young man — nay, we beg pardon, a young gentleman —
who has been accustomed by the habits and the language
of his home, to consider a certain style of living essential to

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 135

the maintenance of his social position, marries one whose
serene, joyous temper gives him assurance of a happy
home. Love would fain build a palace costly as Alad-
din's for the loved one, but as love has no credit in the
market, he is compelled to be limited in his arrange-
ments by the amount of money he can pay or promise.

» ; •*

At least, however, he will do the utmost that he honest-
ly may to make her home worthy of her. He looks
around among his acquaintances possessing about the
same amount of wealth as himself for a model on which
to form his manage, and in accordance with prevailing
custom, a house much larger than they need is bought,
or hired, and furnished with at least as much regard to
show as comfort. His task completed, he looks upon its
result with pride as well as pleasure, and reflects with
complacency, that as two persons will want but little at-
tendance, and no great outlay in the supply of the table,
any deficit occasioned by this first great draft upon their
fortune, will soon be replaced. Under these impressions
their married life begins joyfully. The young wife soon
•finds, however, that the. mistress of a large house and
splendid furniture, with few servants, has no sinecure
place. Her servants, to whom she had perhaps dreamed
of being a friend and guide, whom she had perhaps once

136 WOMAN IN AMEEICA:

regarded as having a' right to some little time for the
consideration of higher objects than cooking and washing,
sweeping and dusting, become in her eyes only useful
machines, valued according to the rapidity and accuracy
with which they perform their labors. But these ma-
chines are human. They become exhausted by labor,
and the smiling, ready, cheerful service is exchanged for

sullen looks and movements. Then we hear, " has

stayed long enough with us, she is spoiled ;" and the
first expression of dissatisfaction in the poor wearied girl,
is eagerly seized as a pretext for dismissing her and sup-
plying her place with another machine whose unworn
springs may work more briskly. But this is not the
limit of the evil. An increasing family brings increased
expenditure, while the fortune remains unchanged. Re-
trenchment must be made where the world will least
perceive it. A servant, perhaps, is dismissed, and the
wife must supply by her increased labor the place thus
vacated. Farewell now to the cultivation of taste, the
improvement of intellect, which had been connected in
her dreams with her married life. Work — work — work,
till heart and hand fail, till the cloud gather on her once
sunny brow, and her cheeks grow pale, and friendly con-
sumption come to give her rest from her labors in the

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 137

grave, or the throbbing brain and over-anxious heart
overpower the reason, and a lunatic asylum receive one
more miserable inmate. Think not this is an exaggerated
picture, or the last an unusual destination under such
circumstances. In a report of the officers for the Retreat
of the Insane, in Hartford, Connecticut, which lies before
us, the intelligent and humane superintendent and phy-
sician, Dr. Butler, says : " In many cases, not having
received in early life a judicious physical or moral train-
ing for her new and arduous station, the young wife, im-
pelled by affection and an honest pride to her utmost
efforts, soon finds that, with her increasing family, the
burden of care and duties increases ; while her physical
strength and capacity of endurance diminish even in a
greater ratio. An economy sometimes deemed neces-
sary, more often ill-judged and cruel, leads the husband
to refrain from supplying the necessary domestic assist-
ance ; the nurse is discharged too soon, and sometimes

no suitable one is provided Thus it must

naturally follow, that, between child-bearing, nursing,
and the accumulation of household duties and drudgery,
the poor heart-broken and disappointed wife loses, in
turn, her appetite, her rest, and her strength ; her ner-
vous system is prostrated, and sinking under her burden,
12*

138 WOMAN IN AMEEICA:

she seeks refuge in a lunatic hospital. This process of-
inducing insanity is by no means limited to the above-
mentioned classes ; the same thing, differing more in de-
gree than in manner, is often seen elsewhere"

Now let us see what might have heen the destiny of
this same woman. Suppose that some good angel had
whispered to the young lover — " Ye, who are a world to
each other, need not care for the world's opinion of your
home." Imagine him, then, selecting for their future
abode a house convenient and comfortable, rather than
large or showy. Good taste is combined with economy
in its furniture. If in any thing he is tempted to over-
step his prescribed limits, it is not in those rooms that
are to meet the curious eyes of the indifferent, but in that
innermost shrine of the sanctuary of his home, to which
only the dearly loved shall be admitted. He may in-
dulge himself in adorning the walls of this room with an
exquisite painting, or in placing in it some article of
graceful luxury. For this simple home he will have
abundant attendance. In this outlay he rejects all the
whispered cautions of economy, aye, even though they
come to his ear from the voice he best loves. " Not a
cent," he says, " for show, but every thing for comfort"
— and what comfort so dear to him as to secure the com-

HER WORK AM) HER REWARD. 139

paiiionsbip of her he loves — to have her meet him with
unexhausted powers — to give her the leisure necessary
for the continued improvement of her mind, and for the
preservation of her youth in its fresh, joyous spring ?

And she, whose faculties have thus found a congenial
soil — shall she idly enjoy the gifts of Heaven ? She will
not, if she be worthy of the home we have endeavored to
describe. Of that home she is to be the presiding genius.
From her its spirit will be caught. She cannot make it
an Eden, for its flowers will wither. Sickness and sor-
row and death will enter it ; but in the warmth and light
reflected on it from the sunshine of her soul, shall grow
all pure and gentle affections — no rivalry, no vain ambi-
tion can live there. There no hurrying step and anxious
look shall excite in the mind of a visiter distrust of his
welcome ; but in the aspect of all around him he shall
read the salutation—" Peace be unto you !" While
refusing to waste her strength, sour her temper, and
burden her domestics, in a vain effort to seem to live as
those do who can command an income twice as large as
her own, she will, by a wise economy, make her resources
available for the largest possible amount of comfort for
all the inmates of her home. Nor will she be unmindful
of beauty in its arrangements. It" is her bower of love,

140 WOMAN EST AMEEICA :

and, as such, she will delight to decorate it by her pure
taste. Yet all outward adornments shall be subservient
to spiritual beauty. No costly luxury or treasure of art
shall be purchased by her with the pence wrung from
the honest wages of laborious poverty. The contentment
that sits upon her husband's brow, the joyous faces of
her children, the smiling, grateful countenances of her
servants, the esteem of the friends who love to partake
the serene enjoyments of her fireside, the blessings of the
poor to whom her benevolence is extended — these are
her luxuries, these the treasures she covets.

Such a home is a temple from which anthems of praise
are continually ascending to the Most High. And is it a
Utopian dream, that such may be the prevailing char-
acter of American homes ? It is a dream which must
become a reality, when our social life shall be modelled
on the principles we have endeavored to unfold in this
little volume. There are few, comparatively, in our land
who may not hope by industry, sobriety, and economy,
to obtain an income sufficient to lift them above sordid
poverty — few who may not receive a good school educa-
tion— few who, if they will relinquish all desire for a
display disproportioned to their means, may not com-
mand the comforts of life by their labor, and yet reserve

HEE WORK AND HER REWARD. 141

some time for spiritual cultivation. But while the wife
and daughters of him who but yesterday plodded with
weary step and anxious heart through our places of busi-
ness, look down to-day from their gilded saloons with

haughty coldness upon those who have been less fortu-

•
nate in the race of life — and while the first, whatever

may be their ignorance, inanity, or vulgarity, are received
in society with a distinction which the last, whatever be
their personal qualities, would vainly claim, there will be
few so self-sustained, few so truly noble, as to relinquish
all social consideration, rather than debase themselves by
a contest in which success can be gained only by a loss
of integrity, of self-respect, and of peace.

On the women of the United States, especially on
those of the Middle and Eastern States, dwelling in cities
where all the varied forms of life are brought closely in
contact, does it chiefly, if not wholly depend, whether
our country is to assume a social attitude in harmony
with her political pretensions ; whether our civilization is
to be of a nobler sort than any the world has yet known,
a civilization founded on the brotherhood of man, in
which the poorest laborer shall be recognised as an heir
of immortality, a child of God, and as such shall have
room for the growth of his spiritual faculties, and be

142 WOMAN IN AMERICA:,

respected according to the advancement of those facul-
ties ; or whether ours shall be a vain attempt to cope
with the civilization of feudal lands, in the gorgeous dis-
plays by which they strike the senses and win the
homage of the uncultivated. In choosing the first of
these forms of development, we ask you to relinquish no
luxury, to sacrifice no enjoyment, which your resources
can command without pressing on your brother man.
Build palaces, if you can- — fill them with all that can
charm the eye, delight the ear, or gratify sinlessly any
sense ; but forget not that you are stewards of God, that
you are surrounded by your brethren, that you have
been brought, by a wise Providence, to a point of time
and space when and where you may act most easily and
efficiently in accordance with the great principles of our
Christian faith, principles reiterated in our national creed.
Remember that no display is consistent with true nobility
— we will leave out of the question the higher motive of
Christian principle — which compels you to be a hard
task-mistress to others ; which forbids you to make such
a remuneration for their labor as you feel in your heart
it deserves ; or which obliges you to claim from them for
that which you do give, such entire devotion of their
time and faculties as will leave them no hope of future

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 143

advancement, no possibility of spiritual cultivation. If
you have been placed upon an eminence, let the reflection
that you cannot, like some of other lands, claim an inde-
feasible and divine right to your position, make you con-
siderate of those who are toiling painfully towards you ;
and let them not find, when they have elevated them-
selves to your level, that you have so walled yourselves
in that they may not stand by your side.

Our fathers, captivated by the beautiful ideal of a
spiritual freedom incompatible with the old forms of life,
followed, as we have seen, the angel of then* vision
across unknown seas, to the untrodden wilderness of a
new world. To them the rudest hut on which that
beatific presence rested was a nobler and a prouder
dwelling than the palace of a king. What was to them
the coarse garb, the scanty food, the rude shelter, for
which they had exchanged a life of luxury, if they won
in the exchange the right to "call no man master on
earth," and to give the intelligent and joyful worship of
free souls to "Him who was their master in Heaven?"
And have we, their daughters, nothing akin in our na-
tures to these lofty spirits ? Shall we woo back to the
fair homes which they bequeathed us a despotism sterner
than that from which they fled ? Shall we place »the

144 WOMAN IN AMERICA:

idols of earthly pomp and power on the pure shrines
which they devoted to the spirit of universal freedom ?
Say not that theirs were the feelings and the work of
men. Women delicately reared — women nurtured in the
peaceful and luxurious homes of England, accompanied
them hither. To these women posterity has raised no
monument, history recorded no eulogium ; yet when we
think of them as pursuing, within their forest homes,
their gentle, household tasks, sometimes, it may be,
waking the silent echoes with their hymns of lofty cheer
— even while in every whisper of the winds they must
have dreamed of the Indian's stealthy step, in every sud-
den call fancied his cry of death — they seem to us not
less heroic than those who, buckling on their armor,
went forth to do battle with their savage foe ; nay,
were not theirs among those circumstances in which,
" to be still, demands immeasurably higher power than
to act ?"*

What, think you, was the American life, in their un-
derstanding of its import? Was it a life of unsubstan-
tial forms — a life of selfish, individual aggrandizement ?
Rather, was it not a life of earnest purpose, of noble aim
— a life of self-sacrifice for the assertion of great princi-
ples, with which the advancement of the human race

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 145

was indissolubly connected? Such we believe it was,
and such would we have ours to be. We would, like
them, place before us a noble ideal, and go steadily for-
ward to its attainment, even though it demanded the
sacrifice of all which the world is accustomed to value
most. And we would resemble them, not only in the
object sought, but in their manner of seeking it. They
claimed no place in council-halls or amid embattled hosts
— "their voices were not heard in the street." Their
power was in the example of their cheerful endurance,
and in the silent influences of the homes over which they
ruled. In those homes, men breathed an atmosphere
which gave strength to every lofty impulse, and decision
to every noble aim. From such homes men might come
forth hard and stern, with too little of the spirit of Him
who wept over the unbelief of the Jews, and refused to
pronounce sentence of condemnation against a guilty
woman ; but in them, they sacrificed to no little vanity,
frittered away their powers in no sensual pursuits.
Without were strife, and danger, and bloodshed — all
that make men hard ; but within were purity and peace
— the peace which ever dwells with those who live for
the performance of duty.

There are some, perhaps, who will say — " This is all
13

146 WOMAN IN AMEEICA I

true ; but it is only great occasions that give opportunity
for the exhibition of great qualities. Those of whom
you speak have fought the battle and won the victory ;
nothing remains for us, but to enjoy the fruits of their
labors."

And is it indeed so ? Look abroad — see how the op-
pressed of other lands are fleeing hither, as to a "city of
refuge. Ignorance, and error, and superstition, follow
fast in their rear. Is there, in such circumstances, no
opportunity for the exhibition of great qualities^for self-
denying generosity, for patient endurance, for courageous
action in the great cause of human happiness ? Will you
object that these, the natives of another land, have no
claim on you for the exercise of such qualities ? Carlyle,
in his own quaint, yet powerful style, tells an anecdote
which may give a sufficient answer to such an objection.
Here it is : "A poor Irish widow, her husband having
died in one of the lanes of Edinburgh, went forth, with
her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help
from the charitable establishments of that city. At this
charitable establishment and then at that she was refused,
referred from one to the other, helped by none, till she
had exhausted them all ; till her strength and heart
failed her: she sank down in typhus fever, died, and

HEE WOEK A1ST) HEE EEWAED. 147

infected her lane with fever, so that seventeen other per-
sons died of fever there in consequence. The humane
physician asks, thereupon, as with a heart too full for
speaking — Would it not have been economy to help this
poor^dfrw ? She took typhus fever, and killed seven-
teen of «ou ! Very curious. The forlorn Irish widow
applied tojer fellow-creatures as if. saying — ' Behold, I
amjsiiiking^ar^of help : ye must help me ! I am your
sister, bone bf ycmr bone ; one God made us : ye must
help m^T They answer — ' ^ <^ impossible : thou art
notefeter of ours.' But she proves her sisterhood ; her
typnus fever kills them ; they actually were her brothers,

though denying it !"
.5V^ f &

AncLso are these multitudes flocking to our shores our
brethren, our sisters. Ignorant, degraded, as many of
them are, they are yet sharers of our nature, and if we
refuse them our aid, they will prove it, even as did the
poor Irish widow, for their ignorance and vice shall infect
us ; or if our matured powers resist the influence bf the
moral malaria they create, our children shall fall victims
to it.

But, perhaps some will say, " We see the truth as you
do ; the course you suggest is noble, the goal to which
it leads, ' a consummation devoutly to be wished ;' but

148 WOMAN IN AMERICA I

we have wandered too far from that course to return to
it — between our present position and that to which you
would point us, lies a great gulf, a gulf which we dare
not even attempt to pass." To such persons we reply,
if you do indeed acknowledge that your present position
is wrong — that, having once occupied it, you can never
hope to attain to that beauty and nobleness which your
soul perceives and admires, and for which, as this very
admiration proves, you were created — strive to win for
your children at least, that better part. You shudder at
those Pagans who cast their children into the cold waters
of the Ganges, or the fiery embrace of Moloch, yet, by
all the influences of your present life, you are preparing
for yours, not a death-pang short — though sharp, follow-
ed by a certain entrance into the Paradise of your faith
— but an eternity of icy selfishness or burning passion.

Look at the young immortal as it lies so fresh and fair
within your arms, the purity of heaven on its brow, and
nothing of earth within its heart but the love with which
it leaps to the sound of the mother- voice and the tender
smile of the mother-eyes ; in that little being, scarce yet
conscious of existence, are enfolded powers to bless or to
curse, extended as the universe, enduring as eternity.
The hand which now clings so feebly, yet so tenaciously,

HER WORK AXD HER REWARD. 149

to your own, may uphold or overthrow an empire — the
voice whose weak cry scarce wins the attention of any
but a mother's ear, may one day stir a nation's heart, and
give the first impulse to actions which will hasten or re-
tard for ages the world's millennial glories. And will
you, nay, dare you strive to compress these powers to
the dimensions of a drawing-room, and to present its
paltry triumphs as the highest reward of their exercise ?
The daughter whose bounding step and joyous prattle
make the music of your home — shall she walk through
the world's dark and troubled ways, an angel of charity,
blessing and blessed, warming into life by he^r cordial
sympathies, all those pure, unselfish affections, by which
we know ourselves allied to heaven, but which fade, and
too often die in the atmosphere of earth — shall "her path
be as that of the just, shining more and more unto the^
perfect day," and shall she pass at length gently, serene-
ly, with peace in her soul, from her earthly home to that
fairer home above of which she has made it no unworthy
type ? — or, shall she be the belle of one, two, or it may
be, three seasons, nurturing in herself and others the
baleful passions of envy and hate, of impurity and pride ?
Shall her life, with all its capabilities of good and ill, of

joy and sorrow, be devoted to frivolities which she would

13*

150 WOMAN ITT AMEEICA :

herself blush to acknowledge as her aim ; and shall
death find her in the midst of such pursuits, and bear
her, vainly struggling — whither? Do you shrink from
such a picture ? Do you ask, how may we secure for
our children the first and nobler destiny ? It is a ques-
tion of deep and solemn import, for whose full answer
we must direct you to the Book of Life ; but some
things are so obviously necessary to your feeblest efforts
to attain such a result, that we will not hesitate to state
them. And first, you must cease to regard your chil-
dren as instruments for the gratification of your own
vanity. Torture not the childish form, instil not the
poison of envy and vanity into the childish heart, that
your ear may be soothed by the soft flatteries of some
fashionable circle. Is your child clothed with a plain
exterior — neither depress her by your regret, nor seek to
win for her, by the splendor of her dress, an admiration
which her person would fail to excite. Rather, teach
her that there is a loveliness more to be desired than any
external beauty, and that the ornament of a meek and
quiet spirit is of more price than rubies. Is she beauti-
ful— teach her that this, too, like every other gift of
Heaven, is valuable only for the good it may enable us
to do, only as a means of influence over other hearts.

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 151

In physical education be more careful of health than of
fashion ; we do not say of beauty, for between the laws of
health and of beauty there is no want of harmony, while
fashion often contradicts both. It requires little reflec-
tion to perceive what must be the influence on a child's
mind of having the free movements of nature impeded,
and present discomfort and the apprehension of future
disease inflicted on her, that her form may be forced into
the mould prescribed by the caprice of ton.

As the first dawn of childhood brightens into day — as
the faculties expand and the observation is quickened —
you can no longer hope to form your child to a nobler life,
while you continue yourself to tread the beaten round of
frivolous amusements and selfish pleasures. How can you
preface a day devoted to such objects, by the lesson that
we were created to be co-workers with God in the eleva-
tion of our own natures and those of our brethren ; that
the day has been lost to us in which we have accom-
plished no useful work, subtracted nothing from the evil,
or added nothing to the good, in our world ? Should
you even summon courage to utter such sentiments, con-
tradicted as they would be by every hour of your lives,
could you expect them to make any impression on the
minds to which they would be addressed ? Surely not.

152 . WOMAN IN AMERICA :

If it be indeed impossible to make your life a fit model,
and your home a fit school for the inculcation of the
principles you approve, you must be content to see the
lives of your children shadowed by the clouds which
have settled so darkly over your own ; to see their earn-
est purposes and nobler aspirations exchanged for the
false and the frivolous conventionalisms, of which you
have learned, by your own sad experience, that their
charm soon ceases, and their despotism never ends ; or
you must sacrifice their society, and seek for them a
model and a home elsewhere. Schools there are — and
•we rejoice to believe that they are becoming more numer-
ous— in which the principles of a true Christian civiliza-
tion are inculcated, in which the young are taught that
no extrinsic advantages of wealth or station will atone
for the want of those personal qualities that command
respect — schools in which the rich and the poor meet
together, and that pupil is most prized who promises,
by the highest intellectual power and the purest moral
principle, to make the most useful member of society.
It is by the pupils of such schools, that the American
life — a life of usefulness, of true refinement, and of wise
philanthropy — must be instituted and sustained. In the
support of such schools, therefore, we find the most en •

•*- x

. . •

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 153

couraging promise for the future destiny of our country
and of the world."

We are not advocating the principles of a savage de-
mocracy ; we would not, if we could, force into uncon-
genial association intelligence and ignorance, rudeness
and refinement. We have spoken of the union of the
laboring hand with the thoughtful mind and the cul-
tivated manner, but we have nowhere insinuated the
desire to see vulgarity and refinement brought into un-
natural connection. We would set in motion influences
by which vulgarity, whether clothed in the garb of
prince or peasant, whether seated in high places or plod-
ding through lanes and fields, should be banished from
our land. We desire that the arrangements of our social
life may be such that each, in his own sphere, may have
room to develop himself freely, and with such aids as will
give to that development a right direction. Esteeming
the glorious ray kindled by the breath of the Almighty
beyond the feeble glimmer of a diamond, we would have
our social life adapted to cherish and to exhibit the spirit
which dwells in man, rather than the clothing which en-
velops him. We would have our conventional arrange-
ments so modified as no longer to press out of sight all
that is noblest among us ; no longer to set up a golden

154 WOMAN IN AMERICA:

calf for worship in the very presence of the most sub-
lime manifestations of the Divine Spirit; no longer,
by making idleness and display the terms of social dis-
tinction, at once to stimulate the passion for wealth and
check the honest and lawful efforts for its acquisition,
giving birth to wild speculations and fraudulent practices,
to misery, and madness, and crime.

It has been said that in our land, the child of the rich
man is often father to the poor man. This more than
usual instability of fortune is probably the result of that
ambition for display to which we have already so often
alluded. We note it now, however, not to investigate
its cause, but to use it as an incentive to all, in the midst
of riches, to cultivate hi .themselves and in their children,
consideration for those less fortunate. 'Let them remem-
ber that their children, or their children's children, may
reap the benefit of the general inculcation of such a sen-
timent.

A motive nobler but less influential, we fear, might
be found in that patriotism which has become in mod-
ern times a word of light value. We are told some-
times that this is an emotion incompatible with that uni-
versal philanthropy inculcated by the gospel of Christ.
We fear, however, that we have exchanged the old Ro-

HER WORK AND HER REWARD. 155

f

man devotion to our own land, not for a wider but for a

narrower sentiment — for one which begins, continues, and
ends, in self. The objects which we have commended
should be alike dear to us as Americans and as Christian
philanthropists, since they would prepare our country, by
the influence of a thorough public instruction and the
more enduring influence of its homes, to become the
source of blessing to the world.

The dignity of labor, the superiority of a civilization
which shall look to the moral and intellectual cultivation
of all, over that which presents evidence of the refine-
ments in luxury and art enjoyed by a few ; these are the
ideas we have striven to enforce". The conception still
stands before us — noble, beautiful, as when first it lured
us to undertake its presentation. The task has been
fulfilled, imperfectly we are conscious, yet with an honest,
earnest effort. The world's rushing tide may drown our
feeble voice for a time, but if we have spoken true words,
as we believe, they will not be lost ; some faint echo of
their tone may perchance fall on the ear and stir the
heart of one who will give them worthier utterance,
So BE IT.

THE END.

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