For myself, I would withhold from no sister or daughter, or wife of mine, any ascertained fact whatever. It should be to me a duty and a pleasure to communicate to them all I knew myself: and I should hold it an insult to their understandings and their hearts to imagine, that their virtue would diminish as their knowledge increased. Vice is never the offspring of just knowledge, and they who say it is, slander their own nature. Would we but trust human nature, instead of continually suspecting it, and guarding it by bolts and bars, and thinking to make it very chaste by keeping it very ignorant, what a different world we should have of it! The virtue of ignorance is a sickly plant, ever exposed to the caterpillar of corruption, liable to be scorched and blasted even by the free light of heaven; of precarious growth; and, even if at last artificially matured, of little or no real value. I know that parents often think it right and proper to withhold from their children—especially from their daughters—facts the most influential on their future lives, and the knowledge of which is essential to every man and woman’s well-being.[22] Such a course has ever appeared to me ill-judged and productive of very injurious effects. A girl is surely no whit the better for believing, until her marriage night that children are found among the cabbage leaves in the garden. The imagination is excited, the curiosity kept continually on the stretch; and that which, if simply explained, would have been recollected only as any other physiological phenomenon, assumes all the rank and importance and engrossing interest of a mystery. Nay, I am well convinced, that mere curiosity has often led ignorant young people into situations, from which a little more confidence and openness on the part of their parents or guardians, would have effectually secured them. In the monkish days of mental darkness, when it was taught and believed, that all the imaginations and all the thoughts of man are only evil continually—when it was deemed right and proper to secure the submission of the mass by withholding from them the knowledge even how to read and write—in those days, it was all very well to shut up the physiological page, and tell us, that on the day we read therein we should surely die. But those times are past. In this nineteenth century, men and women read, think, discuss, enquire, judge for themselves. If, in these latter days, there is to be virtue at all, she must be the offspring of knowledge and of free enquiry, not of ignorance and mystery. We _cannot_ prevent the spread of any real knowledge, even if we would; we _ought_ not, even if we could.