It is all very well for the advocates of youthful innocence to affect to resent the slur supposed to be cast on girlhood by the advocacy of this closer guardianship; or for those who do not know the world to make their ignorance the measure of another's knowledge, and to deny what they have not proved for themselves. Those who do know the world know what they say when they deprecate the excessive freedom which is too often granted to unmarried girls; and their warning is fully justified by experience when they call mothers back to their duty of stricter watchfulness. If indeed the young are capable of self-protection, then we grant with them that mothers are a mistake:--Let them abdicate without more ado. If license is more desirable than modesty, and liberty better than reticence, the girls may as well be left, as practically they are already, free from the mother's guardianship; but if we have a doubt that way, we may as well give it the benefit of consideration, and think a little on the subject before going further on the present line. From the first the mother, in the well-to-do classes, acts too much the part of the hen ostrich with her eggs. She trusts to the kindly influences of external circumstances rather than to her own care to make the hatching successful. Nurses, governesses, schools, in turn relieve her of the irksome duties of maternity. She sees her little ones at their stated hour, and for the other twenty-three leaves them to receive their first indelible impress from a class which she is never tired of disparaging. As the children grow older the women by whom they are moulded become higher in the social and intellectual scale, but they are no more than before subordinated to the mother's personal supervision. She, for her part, cares only that her girls shall be taught the correct shibboleth of their station; and for the rest, if she thinks at all, she cradles herself in a generous trust in the goodness of human nature, or the incorruptibility of her brood beyond that of any other woman's brood. When they come under her own immediate hand, 'finished' and ready to be introduced, she knows about as much of them as she knows of her neighbours' girls in the next square; and in nine cases out of ten the sole duties towards them which are undertaken by her are shirked when possible, as a _corvée_ which she is too wise to bear unnecessarily. When she can, she shuffles them off on some kind neighbourly hands, and lets her daughters 'go about' with the first person who offers, glad to have a little breathing time on her own side, and with always that generous trust in providence and vicarious protection which has marked her maternal career throughout.