your sons to be selfish and to think
only of themselves, you will be responsible for much sadness among the
women who are to be their wives in the future. If you let your daughters
grow up idle, perhaps under the mistaken impression that as you
yourselves have had to work hard they shall know only enjoyment, you are
preparing them to be useless to others and burdens to themselves. Teach
boys and girls alike that they are not to look forward to lives spent in
avoiding difficulties, but to lives spent in overcoming difficulties.
Teach them that work, for themselves and also for others, is not curse
but a blessing; seek to make them happy, to make them enjoy life, but
seek also to make them face life with the steadfast resolution to wrest
success from labor and adversity, and to do their whole duty before God
and to man. Surely she who can thus train her sons and her daughters is
thrice fortunate among women.

There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of
children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to
those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great
blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these
blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness,
self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference
between the all-important and the unimportant,--why, such a creature
merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away
in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those
dependent upon him, and who tho able-bodied is yet content to eat in
idleness the bread which others provide.

The existence of women of this type forms one of the most unpleasant and
unwholesome features of modern life. If any one is so dim of vision as
to fail to see what a thoroughly unlovely creature such a woman is I
wish they would read Judge Robert Grant's novel "Unleavened Bread,"
ponder seriously the character of Selma, and think of the fate that
would surely overcome any nation which developed its average and typical
woman along such lines. Unfortunately it would be untrue to say that
this type exists only in American novels. That it also exists in
American life is made unpleasantly evident by the statistics as to the
dwindling families in some localities. It is made evident in equally
sinister fashion by the census statistics as to divorce, which are
fairly appalling; for easy divorce