In the midst of our large family, of different ages, of vigorous growth, of great individuality and forcefulness of expression, my mother's was the administrative power. My father habitually referred everything to her, and leaned on her advice with a childlike dependence. She read the character of each, she mediated between opposing natures: she translated the dialect of different sorts of spirits, to each other. In a family of young children, there is a chance for every sort and variety of natures; and for natures whose modes of feeling are as foreign to each other, as those of the French and the English. It needs a common interpreter, who understands every dialect of the soul, thus to translate differences of individuality into a common language of love. It has often seemed to me a fair question, on a review of the way my mother ruled in our family, whether the politics of the ideal state in a millennial community, should not be one equally pervaded by mother-influences. The woman question of our day, as I understand it is this.--Shall MOTHERHOOD ever be felt in the public administration of the affairs of state? The state is nothing more nor less than a collection of families, and what would be good or bad for the individual family, would be good or bad for the state. Such as our family would have been, ruled only by my father, without my mother, such the political state is, and has been; there have been in it "conscript fathers," but no "conscript mothers;" yet is not a mother's influence needed in acts that relate to the interests of collected families as much as in individual ones? The state, at this very day, needs an influence like what I remember our mother's to have been, in our great, vigorous, growing family,--an influence quiet, calm, warming, purifying, uniting--it needs a womanly economy and thrift in husbanding and applying its material resources--it needs a divining power, by which different sections and different races can be interpreted to each other, and blended together in love--it needs an educating power, by which its immature children may be trained in virtue--it needs a loving and redeeming power, by which its erring and criminal children may be borne with, purified, and led back to virtue.