"You remember," said I, "the apothegm of one of the old divines, that if two angels were sent down from heaven, the one to govern a kingdom, and the other to sweep a street, they would not feel any disposition to change works." "Well, that just shows that they are angels, and not mortals," said Pheasant; "but we poor human beings see things differently." "Yet, my child, what could Grant or Sherman have done, if it had not been for the thousands of brave privates who were content to do each their imperceptible little,--if it had not been for the poor, unnoticed, faithful, never-failing common soldiers, who did the work and bore the suffering? No _one_ man saved our country, or could save it; nor could the men have saved it without the women. Every mother that said to her son, Go; every wife that strengthened the hands of her husband; every girl who sent courageous letters to her betrothed; every woman who worked for a fair; every grandam whose trembling hands knit stockings and scraped lint; every little maiden who hemmed shirts and made comfort-bags for soldiers,--each and all have been the joint doers of a great heroic work, the doing of which has been the regeneration of our era. A whole generation has learned the luxury of thinking heroic thoughts and being conversant with heroic deeds, and I have faith to believe that all this is not to go out in a mere crush of fashionable luxury and folly and frivolous emptiness,--but that our girls are going to merit the high praise given us by De Tocqueville, when he placed first among the causes of our prosperity the _noble character of American women_. Because foolish female persons in New York are striving to outdo the _demi-monde_ of Paris in extravagance, it must not follow that every sensible and patriotic matron, and every nice, modest young girl, must forthwith, and without inquiry, rush as far after them as they possibly can. Because Mrs. Shoddy opens a ball in a two-thousand-dollar lace dress, every girl in the land need not look with shame on her modest white muslin. Somewhere between the fast women of Paris and the daughters of Christian American families there should be established a _cordon sanitaire_, to keep out the contagion of manners, customs, and habits with which a noble-minded, religious democratic people ought to have nothing to do."