living--who people the madhouses and asylums, what of them? Driven crazy
by their brutal husbands, do you suggest? Not at all! In France,
Bavaria, Prussia, Hanover, four out of every five are unmarried; and
throughout the civilised world there are everywhere three or four single
to one married woman in the establishments for the insane, in
proportion to the whole number of the two classes above twenty-one years
of age.

Other women decline to marry because they have, forsooth, a 'life work'
to accomplish. Some great project fills their mind. Perchance they
emulate Madame de Stael, and would electrify the country by their novel
views in politics; or they have a literary vein they fain would exploit;
or they feel called upon to teach the freedmen, or to keep their
position as leaders of fashion. A husband would trammel them. If they
did marry, they would take the very foolish advice of a contemporary,
and go through life with an indignant protest at its littleness. Let
such women know that they underrate the married state, its powers and
its opportunities. There are no loftier missions than can there be
carried out, no nobler games than can there be played. When we think of
these objections, coming, as they have to us, from high-spirited,
earnest girls, the queens of their sex, our memory runs back to the
famous women of history, the brightest jewels in the coronet of time,
and we find as many, ay, more, married women than single who pursued to
their ends mighty achievements.

If you speak of Judith and Joan of Arc, who delivered their fatherlands
from the enemy by a daring no man can equal, we shall recall the
peaceful victories of her, wife of the barbarian Chlodwig, who taught
the rude Franks the mild religion of Nazareth, and of her who extended
from Byzantium the holy symbol of the cross over the wilds of Russia.
The really great women of this age, are they mostly married or single?
They are mostly married, and they are good wives and tender mothers.

What we have just written, we read to an amiable woman.

'But,' she exclaimed, 'what have you to say to her whom high duties or a
hard fate condemns to a single life, and to the name of the old maid?'

Alas! what can we say to such? We feel that

'Earthlier happy is the rose distilled,
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.'

Yet there is ever a blessing in store for those who suffer here, and th