But of this I have no fear. The love of right is implanted
indelibly in your nature, and your own peace is as dependant as
mine and as your mother's upon its constant culture.
Your conduct hitherto has been committed to yourself. Satisfied
with establishing your principles upon the adamantine pillars of
religion and conscience, we have not feared leaving you the entire
possession of general liberty. Nor do I mean to withdraw it, though
the present state of your affairs, and what for some time past I
have painfully observed of your precipitance, oblige me to add
partial counsel to standing precept, and exhortation to advice. I
shall give them, however, with diffidence, fairly acknowledging and
blending my own perplexities with yours.
The temporal destiny of woman is enwrapt in still more impenetrable
obscurity than that of man. She begins her career by being involved
in all the worldly accidents of a parent; she continues it by being
associated in all that may environ a husband: and the difficulties
arising from this doubly appendant state, are augmented by the next
to impossibility, that the first dependance should pave the way for
the ultimate. What parent yet has been gifted with the foresight to
say, 'I will educate my daughter for the station to which she shall
belong?' Let us even suppose that station to be fixed by himself,
rarely as the chances of life authorise such a presumption; his
daughter all duty, and the partner of his own selection solicitous
of the alliance: is he at all more secure he has provided even for
her external welfare? What, in this sublunary existence, is the
state from which she shall neither rise nor fall? Who shall say
that in a few years, a few months, perhaps less, the situation in
which the prosperity of his own views has placed her, may not
change for one more humble than he has fitted her for enduring, or
more exalted than he has accomplished her for sustaining? The
conscience, indeed, of the father is not responsible for events,
but the infelicity of the daughter is not less a subject of pity.