O leave those angry common-places to
others!--they do not come well from you. Do not force me to remind you,
that women have achieved enough to silence them forever,[4] and how
often must that truism be repeated, that it is not a woman's attainments
which make her amiable or unamiable, estimable or the contrary, but her
qualities? A time is coming, perhaps, when the education of women will
be considered, with a view to their future destination as the mothers
and nurses of legislators and statesmen, and the cultivation of their
powers of reflection and moral feelings supersede the exciting drudgery
by which they are now crammed with knowledge and accomplishments.

MEDON.

Well--till that blessed period arrives, I wish you would leave us the
province of politics to ourselves. I see here you have treated of a very
different class of beings, "_women in whom the affections and the moral
sentiments predominate_." Are there many such, think you, in the world?

ALDA.

Yes, many such; the development of affection and sentiment is more quiet
and unobtrusive than that of passion and intellect, and less observed;
it is more common, too, therefore less remarked; but in women it
generally gives the prevailing tone to the character, except where
vanity has been made the ruling motive.

MEDON.

Except! I admire your exception! You make in this case the rule the
exception. Look round the world.

ALDA.

You are not one of those with whom that common phrase "the world"
signifies the circle, whatever and wherever that may be, which limits
our individual experience--as a child considers the visible horizon as
the bounds which shut in the mighty universe. Believe me, it is a sorry,
vulgar kind of wisdom, if it be wisdom--a shallow and confined
philosophy, if it be philosophy--which resolves all human motives and
impulses into egotism in one sex, and vanity in the other. Such may be
the way of _the world_, as it is called--the result of a very artificial
and corrupt state of society, but such is not general nature, nor female
nature. Would you see the kindly, self-sacrificing affections developed
under their most honest but least poetical guise--displayed without any
mixture of vanity, and unchecked in the display by any fear of being
thought vain?--you will see it, not among the prosperous, the high-born,
the educated, "far, far removed from want, and gr