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to take care of themselves, and that, too, after having, through the false notions of their parents, wasted the years in which they ought to have learned how successfully to maintain themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood. Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of, but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of which I could make a livelihood." You say you have a fortune to leave them. O man and woman! have you not learned that, like vultures, like hawks, like eagles, riches have wings and fly away? Though you should be successful in leaving a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the sunken money cannot be pumped up again, prove to them that it was eternally decreed that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the most orthodox and heavenly style. O the damnable schemes that professed Christians will engage in--until God puts his fingers into the collar of the hypocrite's robe and rips it clear down to the bottom! You have no right, because you are well off, to conclude that your children are going to be as well off. A man died, leaving a large fortune. His son, a few months ago, fell dead in a Philadelphia grog-shop. His old comrades came in and said, as they bent over his corpse: "What is the matter with you, Boggsey?" The surgeon standing over him said: "Hush up! he is dead!"--"Ah, he is dead!" they said. "Come, boys, let us go and take a drink in memory of poor Boggsey!" Have you nothing better than money to leave your children? If you have not, but send your daughters into the world with empty brain and unskilled hand, you are guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide, infanticide--compared with which that of poor Hester Vaughan was innocence. There are women toiling in our cities for three and four dollars per week, who were the daughters of merchant princes. These suffering ones now would be glad to have the crumbs that once fell from their father's table. That worn-out, broken shoe that she wears is the
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