It is a painful fact that education, not excepting religious education, rarely gives a serious taste for study to young girls or young women. Envoys from God to the domestic hearth, guardians of the holy traditions of faith, honor, and loyalty, women, even devout Christian women, seem to be the adversaries of work whether for their husbands or their children, but especially for their sons. I have seen women who found it difficult not to regard the time given to study as stolen from them. Is this for want of intelligence or aptitude? I think not. I attribute this prejudice, first, to the education we give them, light, frivolous, and superficial, if not absolutely false; and, secondly, to the part assigned to them in the world, and the place reserved for them in families, and even in some Christian families. {39} We do not wish women to study; they do not wish those about them to study. We do not like to see them employed; they do not like to see others employed, and they succeed only too well in preventing their husbands and children from working. This is an immense misfortune, a most fatal influence. It is useless to say to men, "Work, accept offices, occupy your time." While women seek to destroy the effect of our advice, it will never produce results. So long as mothers advise their daughters not to marry men in office; so long as the young wife uses her whole art to disgust her husband with employment, and the young mother fails to inculcate in her children the necessity of self-culture, of training the mind and talents as one cultivates a precious plant, so long will the law of labor remain, with rare exceptions, unobserved. In the present stage of customs and manners, home life being what it is, women only can effectively protect a spirit of industry; make it habitual; inculcate, foster, facilitate, and even enforce it upon those around them; early preparing the way for it, rendering it possible and easy, according to it esteem, encouragement, and admiration.