In herself, Martha Washington was in no wise a remarkable woman. Personally, she was a fair representative of the average American matron of the eighteenth century. I say American, for whatever may be her right to boast of superior educational advantages to-day, in the time of Martha Washington and Abigail Adams, New England ignored utterly the education of her women. They were shut out even from the Boston High-School, because they had flocked to it in such numbers in pursuit of knowledge. While her brother went to Harvard, the girl of Massachusetts, if taught at all, was self-taught. Massachusetts had no right to boast over Virginia in that day. The daughters of the cavalier probably were oftener taught to dance and to play the spinnet than the daughters of the Puritans; but neither could spell, nor many more than barely read. But had Martha Washington enjoyed the highest mental privileges, she would never have been known to the world as an intellectual woman, or as a woman who, by any impulse of her unassisted nature, would ever have risen above the commonplace. She could spin, but she could not spell. She could bask in the warmth of the bountiful home whose heavy cares were all carried by her illustrious husband. She could pack the family coach with delicacies, and go through storm and mud once a year to his camp, when the perils of his country had made him its deliverer; but it is doubtful if any impulse of her soul would ever have roused her to the majestic eloquence of Abigail Adams, who, when she read the English King’s proclamation to his rebellious colonies, with her little children about her in the depth of the night, wrote to her absent husband: “This intelligence will make a plain path for you, though a dangerous one. I could not join to-day in the petition of our worthy pastor for a reconciliation between our no longer parent state, but tyrant state, and these colonies. Let us separate; they are unworthy to be our brethren. Let us renounce them, and instead of supplications as formerly for their prosperity and happiness; let us beseech the Almighty to blast their counsels and bring to naught all their devices.”