rt an
ignorant influence all through her life. She will perpetuate the
absurdities of ignorant people. She will do the work of ignorance with
her husband and family. Still worse is a neighborhood of ignorant wives.
A State of ignorant wives would bring barbarism again. And how could it
be otherwise, if all girls should marry in their girlhood? It is the
girls that live to womanhood before they marry that redeem and polish
society. Those who marry in girlhood are drawbacks on society. They are
dead weights holding back the wheels of progress. There are but few
truly educated and influential women in the country who married before
they were twenty-five--many of them not till after. They are now the
pride and glory of their husbands, of the communities and States in
which they live. I hold that a noble and influential woman is an honor
to the country and a pillar of civil and religious liberty. Every such
woman is a central sun radiating intellectual and moral light,
diffusing strength and life to all about her. The hope of the
country--ay, of the world--is in its women; I may say its wives. Now and
then a wife will develop and educate herself after she is married, if
she is fortunate enough to get a husband who will encourage and help her
in the work, even if she is married young; but the great mass will
remain in _statu quo_. If they marry ignorant they will remain ignorant.
I can not press too strongly this point of preparation for Marriage.

There is more depends upon it than we at first imagine. Every wife is to
be the center of a family. Boys and girls, men and women, are to go out
from her to live in the world. Scan it closely and you will find that
the world will be modeled very much after its wives. If we have great
and good men, great and good institutions, States and countries, it is
because we have great and good wives. A wife will be happy just about in
proportion to the amount of good she does. That amount of good will
depend very much upon the education of her girlhood; so that view it in
whatever light we will, a woman's life, usefulness, and happiness depend
in no small degree upon the length and character of her girlhood. If she
remains unmarried till she is twenty-three or twenty-five, and develops
and cultivates herself as she ought, she will be almost sure to make a
good and useful woman, an ornament and an inspiration to the circle in
which she moves. If she marries at sixteen or eighteen she will be v