r purity, or spoil their manners, or
destroy their souls.

From the awkward cut of Samuel's coat you know his mother Hannah did not
make it. Out from under flaming chandeliers, and off from imported
carpets, and down the granite stairs, there has come a great crowd of
children in this day, untrained, saucy, incompetent for all practical
duties of life, ready to be caught in the first whirl of crime and
sensuality. Indolent and unfaithful mothers will make indolent and
unfaithful children. You cannot expect neatness and order in any house
where the daughters see nothing but slatternness and upsidedownativeness
in their parents. Let Hannah be idle, and most certainly Samuel will
grow up idle.

Who are the industrious men in all our occupations and professions?
Who are they managing the merchandise of the world, building the
walls, tinning the roofs, weaving the carpets, making the laws,
governing the nations, making the earth to quake, and heave, and roar,
and rattle with the tread of gigantic enterprises? Who are they? For
the most part they descended from industrious mothers, who, in the old
homestead, used to spin their own yarn, and weave their own carpets,
and plait their own door-mats, and flag their own chairs, and do their
own work. The stalwart men and the

INFLUENTIAL WOMEN

of this day, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, came from such an
illustrious ancestry of hard knuckles and homespun.

And who are these people in society, light as froth, blown every
whither of temptation and fashion--the peddlers of filthy stories, the
dancing-jacks of political parties, the scum of society, the
tavern-lounging, the store-infesting, the men of low wink, and filthy
chuckle, and brass breast-pins, and rotten associations? For the most
part, they came from mothers idle and disgusting--the scandal-mongers
of society, going from house to house, attending to everybody's
business but their own, believing in witches, and ghosts, and
horseshoes to keep the devil out of the churn, and by a godless life
setting their children on the very verge of hell. The mothers of
Samuel Johnson, and of Alfred the Great, and Isaac Newton, and of St.
Augustine, and of Richard Cecil, and of President Edwards, for the
most part were industrious, hard-working mothers.

Now, while I congratulate all Christian mothers upon the wealth and
the modern science which may afford them all kinds of help, let me say
that every mother ought to be obs