dress handsomely, have abundant leisure to take care of their clothes
and turn their wardrobes to the best account, and they very soon
acquire skill in doing it equal to that displayed by any women of any
country. They remit money continually to relatives in Ireland, and
from time to time pay the passage of one and another to this
country,--and whole families have thus been established in American
life by the efforts of one young girl. Now, for my part, I do not
grudge my Irish fellow citizens these advantages obtained by honest
labor and good conduct; they deserve all the good fortune thus
accruing to them. But when I see sickly, nervous American women
jostling and struggling in the few crowded avenues which are open to
mere brain, I cannot help thinking how much better their lot would
have been, with good strong bodies, steady nerves, healthy digestion,
and the habit of looking any kind of work in the face, which used to
be characteristic of American women generally, and of Yankee women in
particular."

"The matter becomes still graver," said I, "by the laws of descent.
The woman who enfeebles her muscular system by sedentary occupation,
and over-stimulates her brain and nervous system, when she becomes a
mother perpetuates these evils to her offspring. Her children will be
born feeble and delicate, incapable of sustaining any severe strain of
body or mind. The universal cry now about the ill health of young
American girls is the fruit of some three generations of neglect of
physical exercise and undue stimulus of brain and nerves. Young girls
now are universally _born_ delicate. The most careful hygienic
treatment during childhood, the strictest attention to diet, dress,
and exercise, succeeds merely so far as to produce a girl who is
healthy so long only as she does nothing. With the least strain, her
delicate organism gives out, now here, now there. She cannot study
without her eyes fail or she has headache,--she cannot get up her own
muslins, or sweep a room, or pack a trunk, without bringing on a
backache,--she goes to a concert or a lecture, and must lie by all the
next day from the exertion. If she skates, she is sure to strain some
muscle; or if she falls and strikes her knee or hits her ankle, a
blow that a healthy girl would forget in five minutes terminates in
some mysterious lameness which confines our poor sibyl for months.

"The young American girl of our times is a creature who has not a
particle of