ly domestic in the freedom of their airy nest as the poor hornbills
who ignorantly make home into a dungeon. And certainly each new generation
of orioles, spreading free wings from that pendent cradle, affords a
happier illustration of judicious nurture than is to be found in the
uncouth little offspring of the hornbills, which Wallace describes as "so
flabby and semi-transparent as to resemble a bladder of jelly, furnished
with head, legs, and rudimentary wings, but with not a sign of a feather,
except a few lines of points indicating where they would come."
A SAFEGUARD FOR THE FAMILY
Many German-Americans are warm friends of woman suffrage; but the editors
of "Puck," it seems, are not. In a certain number of that comic journal,
there was an unfavorable cartoon on this reform; and in a following
number,--the number, by the way, which contains that amusing illustration
of the vast seaside hotels of the future, with the cheering announcement,
"Only one mile to the barber's shop," and "Take the cars to the
dining-room,"--a lady came to the rescue, and bravely defended woman
suffrage. It seems that the original cartoon depicted in the corner a
pretty family scene, representing father, mother, and children seated
happily together, with the melancholy motto, "Nevermore, nevermore!"
And when the correspondent, Mrs. Blake, very naturally asks what this
touching picture has to do with woman suffrage, Puck says, "If the
husband in our 'pretty family scene' should propose to vote for the
candidate who was obnoxious to his wife, would this 'pretty family
scene' continue to be a domestic paradise, or would it remind the
spectator of the region in which Dante spent his 'fortnight off'?"
It is beautiful to see how much anxiety there is to preserve the family.
Every step in the modification of the old common law, whereby the wife was,
in Baron Alderson's phrase, "the servant of her husband," was resisted as
tending to endanger the family. The proposal that the wife should control
her own earnings, so that her husband should not have the right to collect
them in order to pay his gambling debts, was declared by English advocates,
in the celebrated case of the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the poetess, to imperil all
the future peace of British households.
Even the liberal-minded "Punch," about the time Girton College was founded
in England, expressed grave doubts whether the harmony of wedded unions
would not receive a blow, from the
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