This duty of _self-culture_ I would notice as one of the demands of the times upon American women in the attainment of the proposed standard. A wide, liberal, generous self-culture, of intellect, of taste, of conscience, for the sake of the better fulfilment of the mission to which, as an American citizen, every woman in the land is called. We do not begin to realize this. It is a great defect in our social system, that, when a woman has left school and settled down in life, she considers it the signal for her to quit all mental acquisition except what she may gather from her desultory reading, and, henceforth, her family and her immediate neighborhood absorb her whole soul under ordinary circumstances. The great majority of our countrywomen thus grow careworn, narrow-minded, self-absorbed. Now this is not right--it is not necessary. A woman's first, most important duty is in her home; but this need not clip the wings of her spirit, so that thought and affection cannot go out into the great world, and feel themselves a part of its restless, throbbing, many-sided life; brain and heart need not stagnate, even if busy, work-a-day life does claim her first endeavors. Indeed, the great danger to our women is not so much that they will become trifling and frivolous, as that they will become narrow-minded and selfish. But these vices of extravagance and excessive devotion to fashion, of which I have spoken, are due, largely, to a still more radical defect in our social education. I mean its _anti-republican spirit_. This is our crowning absurdity. We are good democrats--in theory. It is a pity that our practice does not bear out our theory, for the sake of the homely virtue of consistency. To a great many otherwise sensible people our simple republican ways are distasteful, and they are apt to look with, admiring, envious eyes on the conventional life of foreign lords, not considering how burdened with forms it is, and full of the selfishness, the pride and arrogance of the privileged and titled few, at the bitter expense of the suffering, untitled many. The aping of aristocratic pretensions has been a much-ridiculed foible of American women. It is certain that American society needs republicanizing in all its grades. We have widely departed from the simplicity of the early days and of the founders of the republic, in social life, just as in our political course we had suffered the vital essence of our organic law to become a dead thing, and the whole machinery of the Government to work reversely to its intention. And the cause has been the same in each case. The spirit of a government and the theories embodying it are the reflection of the social condition of a given age and people, so that the one will never be of a higher order than the other; while it is, also, equally true, that the best and most advanced political theories may be suffered to languish in operation, or become wholly dormant, from the influence of social causes.