Unfortunately, poor girls in this enlightened age must be engaged, sitting all the while, several hours every day at fancy work, the piano, and other accomplishments; they, consequently, have little time for exercise of any kind. The bowels, as a matter of course, become constipated; they are, therefore, dosed with pills, with black draughts, with brimstone and treacle—oh! the abomination!—and with medicines of that class, almost _ad infinitum_. What is the consequence? Opening medicines, by constant repetition, lose their effects, and, therefore, require to be made stronger and still stronger, until at length the strongest will scarcely act at all, and the poor unfortunate girl, when she becomes a woman, _if she ever does become one_, is spiritless, heavy, dull, and listless, requiring daily doses of physic, until she almost lives on medicine! All this misery and wretchedness proceed from Nature’s laws having been set at defiance, from _artificial_ means taking the place of _natural_ ones—from a mother adopting as her rule and guide fashion and folly, rather than reason and common sense. When will a mother awake from her folly and stupidity? This is strong language to address to a lady; but it is not stronger than the subject demands. Mothers of England! do, let me entreat you, ponder well upon what I have said. Do rescue your girls from the bondage of fashion and folly, which is worse than the bondage of the Egyptian task-masters; for the Israelites did, in making bricks without straw, work in the open air—“So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw;” but your girls, many of them at least, have no work, either in the house or in the open air—they have no exercise whatever. They are poor, drawling, dawdling, miserable nonentities, with muscles, for the want of proper exercise, like ribbons, and with faces, for the lack of fresh air, as white as a sheet of paper. What a host of charming girls are yearly sacrificed at the shrine of fashion and of folly! Another, and a frequent cause of costiveness, is the bad habit of disobeying the call of having the bowels opened. The moment there is the slightest inclination to relieve the bowels, _instantly_ ought it to be attended to, or serious results will follow. Let me urge a mother to instill into her daughter’s mind the importance of this advice. 371. _Young people are subject to Pimples on the Face, what is the remedy?_