or to man, and it
is in the domain of love that this superiority shines in all its
glory. As a general rule it is the wife who sustains the family. Among
the common people, it is she who economizes, she who watches carefully
over all and corrects the failings, the passionate and impulsive acts,
the discouragements, so frequent with the husband. How often do we see
the father abandon the children, waste his earnings and leave his
situation under some futile pretext, while his courageous wife,
although suffering from hunger and destitution, holds firm and manages
to save the debris which has escaped the excesses and egoism of the
husband.

The husband of a feeble or alcoholic wife sometimes becomes the sole
support of the family, but such exceptions only prove the rule, that
where the normal love and courage of woman are wanting, the family
becomes broken up, for man very rarely possesses the necessary
faculties for its preservation.

It follows from these facts that the modern tendency of women to
become pleasure-seekers, and to take a dislike to maternity, leads to
complete degeneration of society. This is a grave social evil, which
rapidly changes the qualities and power of expansion of a race, and
which must be cured in time, or the race affected by it will be
supplanted by others.

If the feminine mind is generally wanting in intellectual imagination
and power of combination, it is all the more powerful in the practical
intuition of its judgment and in sentimental imagination. The finesse
of its moral and aesthetic sentiments, its natural tact, its
instructive desire to put some element of poetry into all the details
of life, contribute to form true family happiness, a happiness which
the husband and children too often enjoy without fully realizing the
devoted labor, the love and the pains which the mother has given to
create it.

=Routine.=--The reverse of the irradiations of love in woman is
constituted by her failings, which we have already partly indicated.
We may add that her intelligence is usually superficial, that she
attributes an exaggerated importance to trifles, that she often does
not understand the object of ideal conceptions, and remains attached
by routine to all her hobbies. This routine represents in feminine
psychology the excess of a tenacious will applied only to the
repetition of what has been taught. In the family, woman constitutes
the conservative element because sentiment in her much m