passage of one and
another to this country,--and whole families have thus been established
in American life by the efforts of one young girl. Now, for my part, I
do not grudge my Irish fellow-citizens these advantages obtained by
honest labor and good conduct: they deserve all the good fortune thus
accruing to them. But when I see sickly, nervous American women jostling
and struggling in the few crowded avenues which are open to mere brain,
I cannot help thinking how much better their lot would have been, with
good strong bodies, steady nerves, healthy digestion, and the habit of
looking any kind of work in the face, which used to be characteristic of
American women generally, and of Yankee women in particular."

"The matter becomes still graver," said I, "by the laws of descent. The
woman who enfeebles her muscular system by sedentary occupation, and
over-stimulates her brain and nervous system, when she becomes a mother,
perpetuates these evils to her offspring. Her children will be born
feeble and delicate, incapable of sustaining any severe strain of body
or mind. The universal cry now about the ill health of young American
girls is the fruit of some three generations of neglect of physical
exercise and undue stimulus of brain and nerves. Young girls now are
universally _born_ delicate. The most careful hygienic treatment during
childhood, the strictest attention to diet, dress, and exercise,
succeeds merely so far as to produce a girl who is healthy so long only
as she does nothing. With the least strain, her delicate organism gives
out, now here, now there. She cannot study without her eyes fail or she
has headache,--she cannot get up her own muslins, or sweep a room, or
pack a trunk, without bringing on a backache,--she goes to a concert or
a lecture, and must lie by all the next day from the exertion. If she
skates, she is sure to strain some muscle; or if she falls and strikes
her knee or hits her ankle, a blow that a healthy girl would forget in
five minutes terminates in some mysterious lameness which confines our
poor sibyl for months.

"The young American girl of our times is a creature who has not
a particle of vitality to spare,--no reserved stock of force to
draw upon in cases of family exigency. She is exquisitely strung,
she is cultivated, she is refined; but she is too nervous, too
wiry, too sensitive,--she burns away too fast; only the easiest
of circumstances, the most watchful of care and nursing,