s to
barbarism. Where he finds that girls are committed to convents for
education, and have no alternative in life but marriage, in which their
will has no share, and a return to their convent, he may safely conclude
that there a plurality of lovers is a matter of course, and domestic
enjoyments of the highest kind undesired and unknown. He may conclude
that as are the parents, so will be the children; and that, for one more
generation at least, there will be little or no improvement. But where
he finds a variety of occupations open to women; where he perceives them
not only pursuing the lighter mechanic arts, dispensing charity and
organizing schools for the poor, but occupied in education, and in the
study of science and the practice of the fine arts, he may conclude that
here resides the highest domestic enjoyment which has yet been attained,
and the strongest hope of a further advance.

* * * * *

Children in all countries are, as Mrs. Grant of Laggan says, first
vegetables, and then they are animals, and then they come to be people;
but their way of growing out of one stage into another is as different,
in different societies, as their states of mind when they are grown up.
They all have limbs, senses, and intellects; but their growth of heart
and mind depends incalculably upon the spirit of the society amidst
which they are reared. The traveller must study them wherever he meets
them. In one country, multitudes of them lie about in the streets,
basking in the sun, and killing vermin; while the children of the very
poorest persons of another country are decently clothed, and either
busily occupied with such domestic employments as they are capable of,
or at school, or playing among the rocks, or climbing trees, or crawling
about the wooden bridges, without fear or danger. From this one symptom,
the observer might learn the poverty and idleness of the lower classes
of Spain, and the comfort and industry of those of the United States. As
to the children of the richer classes, there is the widest difference in
the world between those who are the idols of their mothers, (as in
societies where the heart's love is lavished on the children which has
not been engaged by the husband,) and those who are early steeped in
corruption, (as in slave countries,) and those who are reared
philosophers and saints, and those to whom home is a sunny paradise
hedged round with love and care, and those who