H. C. W. LETTER VI. WORDS FITLY SPOKEN, BY ONE WHO SPEAKS WITH AUTHORITY. DEAR FRIEND: Would you secure for yourself, your wife and your children, a pure and happy home? Of one thing, then, you must never lose sight. You now regard your wife as fitted to be your companion, intellectually and socially, as well as affectionally. Be sure that no effort is wanting, on your part, to keep her so. If her intellect becomes stunted, and she be deprived of the means and opportunities for improvement, while you enjoy every opportunity to cultivate and enlarge your intellectual powers, how can she possibly feel herself fitted to be your equal companion? Let me ask you carefully to read over the “Appeal of the Wife to the Husband,” in the last letter. Mark well what she says on this subject; how she feels, as she finds herself losing all power to sympathize in the intellectual aspirations and pursuits of her husband. She, intellectually, was sinking, while he was rising; was growing poorer, while he was growing richer; and he took little pains to impart to her his increasing intellectual wealth. All opportunities for intellectual growth were precluded by the anxieties of maternity, which he, without a thought for her intellectual welfare, was constantly imposing upon her. Never impose this function upon your wife, at the expense of her intellectual growth. No wife can ever be made intellectually poorer by maternity, and the cares of a mother, when that relation is joyfully welcomed, and those cares are shared by the husband. But how can a wife’s intellect ever be expanded with new and noble thoughts, when the physical sufferings and mental anguish of a frequent and an undesired maternity are ever present? Stay at home with the mother of your children, except when necessary avocations call you away. Share with her the cares, the anxieties and joys, of the nursery. There cultivate your intellectual powers together by reading, and by conversation,—especially, on all subjects pertaining to parentage and the ante-natal, as well as the post-natal, development, education and life of your children. How anxious will every true and loving husband and father be, to unite with his wife and the mother of his children, in the nursery, to impart and to receive all possible light in regard to these matters!