Your next duties are to your husband’s or father’s servants and workmen. It is said that a clergyman’s wife ought to consider the parish as _her_ flock as well as her husband’s. It may be so: I believe the dogma to be much overstated just now. But of a landlord’s, or employer’s wife (I am inclined to say, too, of an officer’s wife), such a doctrine is absolutely true, and cannot be overstated. A large proportion, therefore, of your parish work will be to influence the men of your family to do their duty by their dependants. You wish to cure the evils under which they labour. The greater proportion of these are in the hands of your men relatives. It is a mockery, for instance, in you to visit the fever-stricken cottage, while your husband leaves it in a state which breeds that fever. Your business is to go to him and say, “_Here is a wrong_; _right it_!” This, as many a beautiful Middle Age legend tells us, has been woman’s function in all uncivilised times; not merely to melt man’s heart to pity, but to awaken it to duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest: that if he will not repair the wrong by justice, she will, if possible (as in those old legends), by self-sacrifice. Be sure this method will conquer. Do but say: “If you will not new-roof that cottage, if you will not make that drain, I will. I will not buy a new dress till it is done; I will sell the horse you gave me, pawn the bracelet you gave me, but the thing shall be done.” Let him see, I say, that you are in earnest, and he will feel that your message is a divine one, which he must obey for very shame and weariness, if for nothing else. This is in my eyes the second part of a woman’s parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind when you hear, as I trust you will, lectures in this place upon that _Sanitary Reform_, without which all efforts for the bettering of the masses are in my eyes not only useless, but hypocritical.