The public school, the play-ground, the freedom of boyish sports, the early departure from home to college or business, the prizes offered to ambition, all exercise a powerful influence upon the boy, tending to modify the action of the mother's conscious training. More powerful than her intellectual and determined effort is usually her affectional influence, swaying him unconsciously and giving him always a centre for his heart and life, to which he returns from all his wanderings. For men, too, life, with all its evil, seems to be measurably adjusted. We do not hear constant discussions of men's sphere and men's education. Each man is left very much to work out his own career, without the responsibility of the whole sex resting upon him. He is at liberty to make mistakes in his medical practice, to blow up steamboats by his carelessness, to preach dull sermons, and write silly books, without finding his whole sex put under ban for his shortcomings, and so he works with a sense of individual power and responsibility which calls out his energies, and educates him even in spite of the foolish cosseting of a mother or the narrow pedantry of a teacher. But in regard to woman, there is a general confession that life is not yet well adapted to her needs, or she to her place in the world. There is a perpetual effort to readjust her claims, to define her position, and to map out her sphere, and these boundary lines are arbitrarily drawn at every conceivable distance from the centre, so that what seems extravagant latitude to one, is far within the narrowest limits of another. Very few have arrived at the conclusion that woman's nature, like man's, is self-determining, and that her character and her powers must decide her destiny; that instead of prescribing the outward limits of her action, the important point is to increase her energy, to regulate her activity by self-discipline, to purify her nature by nobility of thought and sentiment, and then to leave her free to work out her thought into life as she can and must. But this, it seems to me, should be the grand leading principle of a mother in the education of her daughter, to give her such faith in herself, such knowledge of the laws of her own being, such trust in the guiding power of the universe, that she will have a principle of life and growth within her which will react upon all outward circumstances and turn them into means of education. It is in this freedom alone that the essential meaning of her nature will show itself. In free, conscious obedience to law, natural limitations become a source of power, as the hardness of the marble gives effect to the sculptor's forming stroke; but all arbitrary restraints dwarf and deform the growing soul.