ds such dividends as the society you
will find in your home. The company, the talk, the silent sympathy of
that sagacious and congenial person who is your wife yield a return in
spirit, wisdom, moral tone, and pure pleasure to be found in like
measure nowhere else on earth.

It is said that Charles James Fox, the most resourceful debater the
British Parliament has ever seen, was so fond of his home and his wife
that he would actually absent himself from Parliament for the sheer
pleasure of her presence and conversation. Lord Beaconsfield, who, we
are told, married for the mere purpose of ambition, afterward fell
deeply in love with his wife and spent every moment he could in her
society. She proved, too, to be his shrewdest counselor.

Bismarck's boundless love for his princess increased with the years;
yet she was chiefly, and perhaps only, a German "hausfrau"--an ideal
housewife. The German people particularly loved the wife of Bismarck
because of these exclusively domestic traits. Perhaps that was why he
adored her more and more as the years went by. Gladstone, who was a
very surly and irritable person, declared that his wife had made his
life "cushiony."

Of course it is taken for granted in this paper that the young
American wife is this kind of a woman--wise and gentle and
good-natured--above all things good-natured. For says the Bible, "It
is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and an
angry woman." But read what is written in the Book of the right kind
of a woman--one "in whose tongue is the law of kindness," as the
Scriptures' exquisite phraseology has it.

I don't like the tone of the common comment of the American medical
profession about the neurotic condition of our American women. Our
physicians are saying that there is not one American woman in a
hundred who is nervously normal. The profession declares that they are
excitable, irritable, peevish, and that this unfortunate state is
produced by the unnatural and absurd tension they are under all the
time.

Their so-called "social duties"; the minute and nerve-destroying
precision of their housekeeping; their unnecessary overloading of
themselves with tasks futile and fictitious; the determination to
"appear" a little better than their neighbors, and, above all, to have
their children (their _one_ or _two_ children) particularly spick and
span; the long catalogue of folly into which our high-geared, modern
civilization has led our