They say--I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time--the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manœuvres; they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else--a doctrine as unreasonable to hold, as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook, or for wearing what they sew. Could men live so themselves? Would they not be very weary? And, when there came no relief to their weariness, but only reproaches at its slightest manifestation, would not their weariness ferment in time to frenzy?... King of Israel, your model of a woman is a worthy model. But are we, in these days, brought up to be like her? Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal standard? Can they reach it? Can you help them to reach it? Can you give them a field in which their faculties may be exercised and grow? Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids--envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once; but consider the matter well when it is brought before you, receive it as a theme worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle jest or an unmanly insult. You would wish to be proud of your daughters and not to blush for them--then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manœuvrer, the mischief-making tale-bearer. Keep your girls’ minds narrow and fettered--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you. Cultivate them, give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in health, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in age.” And Mary Taylor--Rose Yorke in “Shirley”--added, “Make us efficient workers, able to earn our living in order that we may be good, useful, healthy, self-respecting women.” How far have we travelled in these fifty years towards Mary Taylor’s ideal? How far is it accepted as a right one? Is it now considered a sufficiently ambitious one? There is no doubt that we have travelled much nearer to it than anyone in 1850 would have foreseen, and further than many pioneers at that period would have desired.