less activity. Besides the lessons there is house-work in the
morning, and sewing till into the late evening.

We are a rich nation, but we are not a nation of rich individuals.
Domestic service is expensive, and of poor quality, for no one is
willing to occupy the position of a menial who can find anything else to
do.

The intelligence of our women, combined with the necessity in our
society of producing a good personal impression, together with the habit
of applying their intelligence to the construction and arrangement of
articles of dress, have developed among us a very high order of taste in
these matters, and the skilled labor that can satisfy it, is necessarily
very costly.

Our women spend all they can afford in buying these materials, and save,
in using their own intelligence and hands in making them up.

Very few, in considering the work of our women, take into account the
real brain-power expended in this triple combination of economy, taste,
and execution. Emerson somewhere in his _English Traits_ says, referring
to the English aristocracy:--"It is surprising how much brain can go
into fine manners."

It would be very pertinent to say of American women, "It is surprising
how much brain-work can go into fine dressing," and our girls join their
mothers in this worry and work at a very early age. Passing from work to
society, the strain upon our women is no less. Social gatherings occur
irregularly, have irregular hours, and an irregular regimen of food,
and every one feels a keen stimulus to be both agreeable and brilliant.
English faces at a party look as they do at church, and as they do at
Madame Tussaud's. Contrast with them the smiles, luminous eyes, and
pretty cant or toss of the head of the carefully-dressed American woman,
and think of the work to be done the next day.

In place of a health-seeking instinct in America, we have a feeling
which says, "I do not mind how hard a strain I have, provided I can hold
out till I get through it." We are too much employed to think much of
the discomfort of moderate fatigue and ill-health. Neither have we
sufficient feeling respecting the permanence of the family to lead us to
plan for a succession of descendants. An American says, "I had rather
have forty-five or fifty years of active, satisfactory life, than sixty
or seventy years of a comfortable, dawdling existence;" and, if we look
at the case only as it affects himself, we cannot especially condemn the