do not
design now to open anew any vulgar, worn-out, woman's-rightsy question.
Every remark that could be made on that theme has been made--but one,
and that I will take the liberty to make now in a single sentence,
close the discussion. It is this: the man who gave rubber-boots to
women did more to elevate woman than all the theorizers, male or
female, that were born.

But without any suspicious lunges into that dubious region which lies
outside of woman's universally acknowledged "sphere," (a blight rest
upon the word!) there is within the pale, within boundary-line which
the most conservative never dreamed of questioning, room for a great
divergence of ideas. Now divergence of ideas does not necessarily imply
fighting at short range. People may adopt a course of conduct which
you not approve; yet you may feel it your duty to make no open
animadversio. Circumstances may have suggested such a course to them,
or forced it upon them; and perhaps, considering all things, it is the
best they can do. But when, encouraged by your silence, they publish
it to the world, not only as relatively, but intrinsically, the best
and most desirable,--when, not content with swallowing it themselves as
medicine, they insist on ramming it down your throat as food,--it is
time to buckle on your armor, and have at them.

A little book, published by the Tract Society, "The Mother and her
Work," has been doing just this thing. It is a modest little book. It
makes no pretensions to literary or other superiority. It has much
excellent counsel, pious reflection, and comfortable suggestion. Being
a little book, it costs but little, and it will console, refresh, and
instruct weary, conscientious mothers, and so have a large circulation,
a wide influence, and do an immense amount of mischief. For the Evil
One in his senses never sends out poison labelled "POISON." He mixes it
in with great quantities of innocent and nutritive flour and sugar. He
shapes it in cunning shapes of pigs and lambs and hearts and birds and
braids. He tints it with gay lines of green and pink and rose, and
puts it in the confectioner's glass windows, where you buy--what?
Poison? No, indeed! Candy, at prices to suit the purchasers. So this
good and pious little book has such a preponderance of goodness and
piety that the poison in it will not be detected, except by chemical
analysis. It will go down sweetly, like grapes of Beulah. Nobody will
suspect he is p