Rights." satisfaction which the healthy man derives we suppose we must call "Woman's daily from his homely meal of roast beef and potatoes. This is just what Mr. Beecher is fitted to feel and to express so strongly. The country air! There's nothing like itplenty of it more of it. Whiskey, brandy, beer, wine! Nonsense; man doesn't want these is better without them. Fresh, sparkling spring water! Plenty of it; more of it. Young men will be young men; they must have their day- a little loose society at times - a little rollicking fun a little fashion and pleasure, and so forth! All a delusion a mistake; a fatal | mistake. He who indulges in such things does so because he does not know - has never been man enough to learn what a decent life means- what conservation of force there is in it — what elasticity, health, buoyancy-nay downright animal pleas ure - incomparably keener, better in quality, and more in quantity than the professed voluptuary has a chance of getting. One smile from a pure woman is better than a thousand illicit charms. There is undoubtedly a vast amount of ignorance and prejudice on this subject in England - we might say in Europe. Women are to be taught to make pies and puddings- they are to look after children they are to wear enormous chignons they are to go to church -they are to tinkle on the piano and warble ditties fit only for a lunatic asylum; but write! study science! get a livelihood with their brains, and instantly a sort of blatant cry is raised of "Blue Stocking!" and once raised is cheerfully taken up by a number of idiots, to whom the demon of Ignorance has communicated a kind of stolid hydrophobia, and who go about the world foaming and snapping at every gifted or industrious woman they meet, until they sink at last exhausted in the mud, and are kicked back into their original obscurity. Nevertheless, these useless " "flaneurs of society succeed in doing a good deal of harm, just as a wretched hound will sometimes bite a good many people before it gets its coup de grâce. The fact is, by the incessant repetition of a phrase or an epithet, a kind of flabby, indolent public opinion is actually formed; and once formed is like venom, propagated venom, difficult to reach or destroy. We shall let Mr. Beecher speak for himself, calmly and decidedly, and (what is more significant) with the air of a man who is addressing an audience ready for much more advanced doctrine on this subject than he would be likely to find at present in England. The fact is, that with all its extravagances, its experiments, and its " falutin" failures, America is steadily highpointing to the future in social matters. If we want to know what Europe will be socially in fifty years, we must look at what America is becoming. Many will The Woman is the Queen of the house- say, God forbid! And yet the demoralihold. How great is her office - how noble zation, nay, the social disorganization at are her endowments - how incalculable present rife in transatlantic society - esfor good or evil are the influences she pecially the wild views prevalent about brings to bear upon the husband all along the freedom of woman and the relations of - upon the child, until he or she passes the sexes-may be, nay, we believe, are out into the battle of life - prepared or pointing vaguely but persistently in the unprepared; upon the domestics who are direction of certain reforms and readjustsubject for a time to a hundred depress-ments of moral and social law, which are ing or elevating influences whilst under her direction; to all who frequent the house, and perceive what a household under good or bad direction may be, or ought not to be. It is only when language of this description comes from a man who really believes it himself, that it has a tendency to bring conviction to the eager and inflammable young minds to which it is principally addressed. Mr. Beecher touches his difficult subjects with purity, a delicacy, and, at the same time a realistic firmness not to be surpassed. On the very confines of romance, his fine tact and true feeling save him from sentimentality. "The maiden with hospitable intent lights to the door the now frequent visitor, and a gentle courage sustains her in such farewells as a mo ment before she would have shrunk from. The unsteady lamp goes out, and yet never was twilight so bright, nor were inarticulate sounds ever so full of meaning " (ii. 271). In view of the importance justly attributed to women, we are not surprised to find Mr. Beecher a strong partisan of what needed, which must be carried, and which, when they have been carried, will prove to be the foundation of a new and a better order of things. The transition period no doubt appears chaotic, and society goes blundering on in an alarming manner; but in the process real progress is achieved. Order from disorder, is the law of life. Better living disorder than dead order. [the same cry-that they are stepping beyond At this time those who, looking at Ameri- their sphere. It is the cry to-day, as woman, ca, see farthest, see in its social and po- taxed, punished, restrained in all higher induslitical convulsions not only order coming for itself, but order coming for the civilized world—and those who hold these opinions and who express them, are called vision aries! tries, asks that vote which carries with it control of circumstances. It is unsexing woman! A citizen in our day without a vote is like a smith without a hammer. The forge is hot, the anvil waits, the iron is ready, but the smith has nothing to smite with. The vote is the workman's hammer to-day " (i. 429). "A woman's nature will never be changed. Men might spin, and churn, and knit, and sew, and cook, and rock the cradle for one hundred generations, and not be women. And woman will not become man by external occupations. God's colours do not wash out. Sex is dyed in the wool" (i. 430). We may be excused on so important a subject emphatically an American subjectif we linger over the utterances of while to take at first-hand the real views a highly typical American. It is worth of the best Americans about women: we have heard plenty of extravagant nonsense on this subject from our Transatlantic brethren, let us be patient and hear a little more sense from one who seldom utters anything but sense. But, perhaps, after all, the visionaries are those who can quietly contemplate the revolutions of the past, and still believe that society needs no changes, and that no changes will come, or that beneficial changes will come without pain and loss. exaggeration or caricature. It is pitiful for the common sense of mankind to mark how the chief visionaries, the crowned madmen of every age, have turned out to be right, and the practical people wrong. But let us not thrust honours upon Mr. Beecher which he might be inclined to deprecate. He is not exactly a seer. He is not prophetic, like Emerson. He reflects too immediately, too intensely to be prophetic; but what he reflects we cannot afford to despise. We are indeed beginning to entertain the opinions he boldly assumes to be commonly accepted and acceptable, and much of the following "In the new years that are coming a nobler weighty and valuable matter will, doubt-womanhood will give to us nobler households. less, find an echo in many English hearts Men seem to think that the purity of our houseand homes. Whatever does not, let us holds depends upon their meagreness and upon ponder over; as poor Artemus Ward used their poverty; but I hold that that household is to say about some of his very worst puns, to be the strongest not only, but the purest, the "they will require some thought but will richest, the sweetest, and the most full of deliamply repay attention." cacies as well, which has in it the most of power and of treasure. Augment the thinking "The increasing intelligence in women is des- power of womanhood. You detract in no wise tined to have an important influence upon the from her motive power. Is the heart cheated American family. It is in vain that men cry by the husband's head? Nay, it is rendered out against the emancipation of woman from the stronger. The frailty of the fair sex will cease narrow bounds of the past. It is destiny; it is to be the theme of deriding poets, one day, God that is calling, and woman must obey. when women learn that strength is feminine, The world has unrolled and unfolded until the and that weakness is the accident of sex, and time has come. It is a natural law, and not the not the beauty nor glory. That will be a wholeturbulence of discontented fanatics that calls some and happy period when men and women for a larger development and culture. The alike will be left free to follow the call of God world's history has travelled in one direction. in their own genius The time will come when Woman began at zero, and has through ages there will be liberty for all who are ordained slowly unfolded and risen. Each age has pro-artists to become artists without rebuke, when tested against growth as unsexing women. There has been nothing that men have been so afraid of as unsexing. Ah! God's work was too well done originally for that. In spite of centuries of unsexing, women retain their sex, Mr. Beecher has raised his voice against and they will. Every single footfall forward on the extravagance of modern times, not as it that long journey which they have already pur- ministers to real refinement or even to luxsued has been a footfall that was supposed to be a deviation from the proprieties of their sex. ury, but as it erects a barrier to early marIf you should take to Turkey or Greece that riages. The lesson is needed in England. which every man in his senses allows to be prop- Parents will have wealth for their chiler in woman, it would be considered monstrous.dren, and so of course, children expect to And still, in earlier ages through a hundred de- start in life from where their parents leave grees of development, woman has been met with off, instead of from where they began. scholars may become scholars, and when orators may be orators, whether they be men or women." II.- Marriage. Young men and women nowadays, cannot | California will only serve to call attention marry without a fine house, without ser- to the fact. vants, and horses and carriages; young Modern society does not love manhood wives must be dressed like princesses; but moneyhood; and as long as this is so, but as this cannot be, men dress others who are not their wives like princesses, and drop the fine house and servants, until such time as they can afford a virtuous woman with the necessary additions. "Young men just beginning life need what At no after period, perhaps, they cannot have. of virtuous love and the sympathy of a comin their life do young men need the inspiration panion in their self-denying toil, as when they first enter the battle for their own support (i. 431). 66 men will grow up caring more to be moneyed than to be manly, more to have than to do, more to seem than to be. And this temper reacts fatally upon marriage; it postpones it until life has lost its sweetness Marriage is of course a risk, so is life, without losing its power, and has become so is every thing, but young men, indus- bitter; it parodies it by a number of shorttrious, honourable, with unspoiled hearts lived intrigues, which cast the blossoms of and a fair prospect (who by the way spec- the soul to the four winds of hell; and it ulate in most other things) ought to be profanes it by reducing the marrying man able to speculate a little more in marriage. to a heartless dummy of forty, who steps With health, and all life before them, they forward with a handful of gold, to invest ought to be strong, they ought to feel in a hollow heart! Pathetically and truly courage and confidence in taking a virtu- does Mr. Beecher observe :ous girl to her new home, even if it should not turn out to be a gilded palace. How many middle-class parents who began life on £300 and now have £3,000 per annum, refuse to allow their children with equal chanees, perhaps better education, and better abilities, and better opportunities than ever they enjoyed, to marry under Early marriages are permanent moralities, £800 or £1,000 per annum. The rotten and deferred marriages are temptations to wickextravagance of our social entertainments edness. And yet every year it becomes more is to blame for this the hollow and the and more difficult, concurrent with the reigning heartless show and expenditure that peoideas of society, for young men to enter upon ple on visiting terms even in the middle- that matrimonial state which is the proper classes, exact from each other is to blame. guard of their virtue, as well as the source of With half the money commonly spent on their courage and enterprise. The battle of life dinners, and house decoration, and furniis almost always at the beginning, Then it is ture, and servants, in well-to-do houses, where two cannot live cheaper than one! And that a man needs wedlock." "Society is bad there might be twice the refinement, and five times the comfort now enjoyed by the in the very morning of life, and better fitted young men are under bad influences who, when unhappy victims of an artificial code of than at any later period to grow together with propriety, who are wretched, and pinched, one who is their equal and mate, are debarred and in debt, because they will affect a from marrying through scores of years from style of living just above their means. mere prudential considerations, and the heart There must be a change of feeling through-and the life are sacrificed to the pocket. They out society, before our young men and are tempted to substitute ambition for love when, women can be delivered from their pres- at last, over the ashes and expiring embers of ent enforced celibacy and spinsterhood. their early romance, they select their wife. It And America is no unfit herald of reformis said that men who wait till they are forty or in this direction. In no other country for the wife who was not first a sweetheart!" forty-five years of age select prudently. Alas does a man so count for one, and a woman for one, as in America. Worth of any kind tells over there sooner and more powerfully than in any other country, and it is exactly in this appreciation of personal worth, that the remedy for conventional worth must be found. If the man is worth knowing, do not ask whether his acres are broad; if a man is worth marrying, trust something to the future - he need not be a millionaire to make a woman happy; and as for refinement and luxury, if the mind is refined, the home will be so-let luxury, or what is good of it, come by-andby; if the mind is vulgar, all the gold in III. Children. As one might suppose, Mr. Beecher is family training. Himself one of a large powerful on the subject of children and family, and the father of another large family, he ought to know something about dren is full of delicate insight: he underit, and he does. His sympathy with chilstands them perfectly, he rules them wisely, he loves them dearly. His allusions to the loss of his own little ones are full of feeling : "I have been called," he says, "to give up "If a man wants a flock, he doesn't say, Sheep, sheep!' he says, Give me Saxon, or Spanish, or Southdown.' When it is a wife or children he doesn't care; when it is a horse the kind is very important; when it is an immortal soul-anything will do.", (Heaton, i. 331 ) dear ones not once, nor twice, nor thrice alone, | of modern marriages is highly foolish, and but many times I have sent my children on be- even criminal. fore me. Once wading knee-deep in the snow, I buried my earliest. It was March, and dreary, and shivering and awful; and then the doctrine that Christ sat in an eternal summer of love, and that my child was not buried, but had gone up to One that loved it better than I, was the only comfort I had." (Heaton, vol. ii. 209.) Every now and then his glimpses of child-life are so vivid that he seems like one who sits opposite the child and takes an instantaneous pistol-gram- quick and vivid as a flash of light, the child's mobile face and very look are caught and fixed. "When the child, a little animal greedily seeking to eat, drink, and warm itself, comes under the care of the parent, and is taught that it must not feed itself at the expense of its little brother, it is learning love. The parent says, You must be generous, my child. Why! will you not let poor little brother have anything?' And his great big stomach says, ' No; I want it all myself.' Yet men do not only transmit their physical constitutions, but their mental qualities; not only so, but they have acquired powers and dispositions. What a responsibility! Will they not make themselves ready for marriage? A good moral stock is what is I wanted as a basis to rear the fabric of a family upon. A child may be born to truth, conscience, fidelity, openness; on such dispositions the religious life will be grafted. Religion, it is true, is almost always an after-blossom; but suppose you graft the religious life upon an imperfect moral stem, why then you have those anomalies of which society is full. How striking and how true is the following pas But there is one long and exhaustive sermon on children and family training, itself as it sees the religious life really sage; how a parent's heart must condemn which we had intended to give a length-growing in the child, but struggling, almost ened analysis of, only we are afraid at this stage to multiply extracts. We must here content ourselves with a few pregnant hints to parents and guardians. herited tendencies to lie, to cheat, to exvainly, at enormous disadvantage with in cesses of various kinds : "How beautiful is religion in an honest man! We often hear it said, 'That is a good Christian, but not a very honest man.' People say it is censorious. It is true, nevertheless. The world sees it better than you are willing to see it, and declares it to be a fact. The man has many as First, the greatest stress is laid on what we must call the human stock. An enlightened public opinion, an enlightened conscience, ought not to allow mis-alliances; incurable maladies ought not to be transmitted - men are reckless about pirations, and longings, and struggles, and renothing so much as this. They are reck-pentances; and yet these are all of them rooted less about their health in the procreation in a temperament and in an education that is of children they are reckless of times and seasons — they are reckless of person and circumstances; and yet through their children they damage posterity-they influence the race they set a-going currents of misery, which will never cease, and which will be traced back to them. Mr. Beecher would allow a very wide and wholesome margin for the play of affection in the selection of wives and husbands. He is doubtless aware that an experiment made in one of the Slave States-not so being swept this way and that by the force of temptation. And men see that he is selfish, though he prays beautifully; that he is proud, though he is devout; that he is vain, though he has a great deal of religious sensibility; and they pronounce him a hypocrite. The trouble is that his religion was planted in bad moral soil. If he had been educated in boyhood to conscience, and honour, and truthfulness, and his religion had been planted in these as a soil, the world would not have seen the inconsistency which he exhibits." (Heaton, i. 313.) long ago to raise a superior breed of But preliminaries being granted, the slaves entirely failed, because it was found question of how to deal with the children that natural affection played an important when they arrive, endowed with more or part in the production of even a physically less excellent dispositions, still remains. fine race, and the slave owner had never thought of such a thing as natural affection between two slaves. Mr. Beecher would doubtless be the last to overlook all moral and mental and affectionate influences in connection with marriage, but still he is quite right in saying, that the recklessness Children take a deal of understanding. Parents must learn from their children how to bring them up. Mothers are much quicker at this than fathers. The apostle does not say, "Mothers, do not provoke your children," but, "Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath." Women have Let The faults of a good many children are often excellences in disguise. They are must not taste pears in June. They would be sour, because immature. Now, if some children taste sour, it is because they are simply immature. There are many things to be done before a man is ripened, and there are three principal things which Mr. Beecher thinks a child should be well grounded in. He says: intuition and wisdom. In intellectual mat- | are always fussing at them. But governters men are stronger and wiser than wo- ment over a child is of little use to him. men, but in matters of the heart women are What is wanted is to put government in unspeakably stronger and wiser than men. the child. If you put too many influences Well, then, the mother must learn what is outside of him, you take from him the the plan of the child's character. A child's chance of learning how to govern himself. mind is not, as Mrs. Pipchin held, to be Then, if children are to behave themselves, torn open like an oyster. It should rather they must have something to do. be allowed to unfold like a flower; and it them have their daily work. They will is better to be over indulgent than over have to go down and be knocked about in severe with young children. Very often a a dangerous world, but they will be less child has its mother's temperament, and liable to temptation if they can work, and then its father does not understand it; or have learned to love work. its father's temperament, and then its mother does not understand it. We are often needlessly anxious about our chil-rude and immature forms of virtue. You dren: we think them strange, unnatural we expect from them what they are not ready to give; but our own ignorance is to blame. Then, we are easily frightened: we fancy that every phase of the child's development is going to be permanent; we might as well fancy that the measles were going to be permanent, or the mumps. A child has mumps of obstinacy, mania or rash of irritability, measles of lying. At some periods children will steal. Well, all this seems very dreadful; and, indeed, such tendencies must be watched patiently and checked firmly. But the child is not going to turn out a malefactor for all that. It is simply a little undeveloped creature at six or eight, not much is developed ex-ly restrained from wrong-doing by the influcept the animal nature; a few affections perhaps, not much reason- moral elements are more fancies to it than regulating forces; but instruct the child; time will do wonders; by-and-by all the parts will be developed. Then conscience will take care of that lying tendency, and cut it up by the roots. How many parents now look back to the childhood of their children, simply to think of its develop ment." duct is the first qualification, and the first foundation of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man in the human soul. The older I grow the more I believe it. . . . The next element is self-respect, or the habit of acting, not from what others may think, but from a sense of what is befitting to you... The man who is on "I think truthfulness and openness of con ences around him will, when he goes away from There are many valuable and pleasant sayings about children and child-life scattered throughout the volumes before us; but this sermon on family training is a brilliant little compendium of all Mr. Beecher's mind upon this important subject, and we especially commend it to perplexed and anxious parents. IV. - Money. "It seems impossible to say of that royal woman, as serene as the evening sky, and as glorious and pure as the stars which are in it, that she gave signs and tokens of the utmost depravity in youth. But she did. It was, however, only a fitful manifestation: it was scarcely to be distinguished from a morbid state of the body, and after the patient waiting of a few years. The great question of the almighty dolwhen all the faculties began to get the mind reg-lar is not one likely to escape Mr. Beecher. ulated, this depraved tendency disappeared." There is one very long sermon on the (Heaton, vol. i. p. 335.) love of money which is a perfect masterpiece. It must have taken considerably more than an hour to preach, and must have been delivered with more than his ordinary energy, as at times the apostrophes are almost incoherent, a thing very unusual with Mr. Beecher, and indicating a very high pressure of excitement. Iu Again, too much government spoils a child. Mr. Beecher says that he thinks he was about as well brought up as most children, because his father was so busy, and his mother had so many other children to look after that he was let alone. Some parents cannot let their children be. They |