ally on the mother; for it demands the sympathy with
children which is peculiar to the female heart, the strong maternal
instinct implanted by nature, and directed by a judicious education,
that blending of love and authority, sentiment and reason, sweetness and
power, so characteristic of the noble and true-hearted woman, and which
so admirably fit her to be loved and honored, only less than adored, in
her own household. But though the duties and responsibilities of mothers
in this matter are the heaviest and most important for themselves, and
for the society of all others, yet there are none which are more
neglected.

Now wives and mothers, by neglecting their domestic duties and the
proper family discipline, fail to offer the necessary resistance to
growing lawlessness and crime, aggravated, if not generated, by the
false notions of freedom and equality so widely entertained. It is only
by home discipline, and the early habits of reverence and obedience to
which our children are trained, that the license the government
tolerates, and the courts hardly dare attempt to restrain, can be
counteracted, and the community made a law-loving and a law-abiding
community.

Why is it that the very bases of society have been sapped, and the
conditions of good government despised, or denounced under the name of
despotism? Why is it that social and political life is poisoned in its
source, and the blood of the nation corrupted? It is because wives and
mothers have failed in their domestic duties, and the discipline of
their families. And they have failed in this, because the State did not,
and could not, bring them up to it.

The evils we have to cure cannot be reached by the reading of the
Bible, by Sunday-school training, nor by any possible political or
legislative action. Men or women cannot be legislated into virtue. That
the remedy, to a great extent, must be supplied by woman's action and
influence, we not only concede, but claim. But it is only as woman, as
wife, as mother, that she must do the work: as woman, to soften
asperities, and to refine what else were coarse and brutal; as wife, to
sustain with her affection the resolutions and just aspirations of her
husband, and render home bright and cheerful--"the sweetest place on
earth"; as mother, to direct and inspire the noble and righteous
aspirations of her sons--to train and form her children to early habits
of piety, filial love and reverence, of obedience to God's