of the youthful alien savage
in our midst, or holding the beacon of intellectual advancement bright
and burning before the female youth of the country, and beckoning them
to advance, they are ever doing a good and noble work."

We do not disguise the fact that our hopes for the future, in great
measure, rest on these conventual schools; if they are multiplied, and
the number of their graduates increase, and enter upon the serious
duties of life, the ideal of female education will become higher and
broader; a nobler class of wives and mothers will exert a healthy and
purifying influence; religion will become a real power in the Republic;
the moral tone of the community, and the standard of private and public
morality, will be elevated; and thus may gradually be acquired the
virtues that will enable us, as a people, to escape the dangers that now
threaten us, and to save the Republic as well as our own souls.

Sectarians, indeed, declaim against these schools, and denounce them as
a subtle device of Satan to make their daughters "Romanists"; but Satan
probably dislikes "Romanism" even more than sectarians do, and is much
more in earnest to suppress or ruin our conventual schools, in which he
is not held in much honor, than he is to sustain and encourage them. At
any rate, our countrymen who have such a horror of the religion it is
our glory to profess, that they cannot call it by its true name, would
do well, before denouncing these schools, to establish better schools
for daughters of their own. These modest, retiring Sisters and Nuns, who
have no new theories and schemes of social reform, and upon whom a
certain class of women look down with haughty contempt, as weak,
spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are
doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the
political and social, as well as for the moral and religious, progress
of the country, than the Woman's Rights party, with all their grand
conventions, brilliant speeches, stirring lectures and spirited
journals. By way of parenthesis, we dare tell these women who are
wasting so much time, energy, philanthropy, and brilliant eloquence in
agitating for female suffrage and eligibility, which, if conceded, would
only make matters worse, that, if they have the real interest of their
sex or of the community at heart, they should turn their attention to
the education of daughters for their special functions, not as men, but
a