but it must be between them.  A man and woman must prove that they can be a good husband and wife before they can be admitted to have proved that they are good citizens.  Such a verdict may seem harsh, but it is necessary and just.  Young people just married can not possibly afford to know unhappy couples; and they, in their turn, may, with mutual hypocrisy, rub on in the world; but in the end they feel that the hypocrisy can not be played out.  They gradually withdraw from their friends and acquaintance, and nurse their own miseries at home.

All good men feel, of course, that any distinctive separation of the sexes, all those separate gatherings and marks which would divide woman from man, and set her upon a separate pedestal, are as foolish as they are really impracticable.  You will find no one who believes less in what certain philanthropists call the emancipation of women than a happy mother and wife.  She does not want to be emancipated; and she is quite unwilling that, instead of being the friend and ally of man, she should be his opponent.  She feels truly that the woman’s cause is man’s.

    “For woman is not undeveloped man,
    But diverse.  Could we make her as the man,
    Sweet love were slain, whose dearest bond is this—­
    Not like to like, but like in difference.”

The very virtues of woman, not less than her faults, fit her for her attachment to man.  There is no man so bad as not to find some pitying woman who will admire and love him; and no man so wise but that he shall find some woman equal to the full comprehension of him, ready to understand him and to strengthen him.  With such a woman he will grow more tender, ductile, and appreciative; the man will be more of woman, she of man.  Whether society, as it is at present constituted, fits our young women to be the good wives they should be is another question.  In lower middle life, and with the working classes, it is asserted that the women are not sufficiently taught to fulfill their mission properly; but, if in large towns the exigencies of trade use up a large portion of the female population, it is no wonder that they can not be at the same time good mill-hands, bookbinders, shopwomen, and mothers, cooks, and housewives.  We may well have recourse to public cookery, and talk about working men’s dinners—­thus drifting from an opposite point into the coming socialism—­when we absorb all the home energies of the woman in gaining money sufficient for her daily bread.  Yet these revelations, nor those yet more dreadful ones which come out daily in some of our law courts, are not sufficient to make us overlook the fact that with us by far the larger portion of marriages are happy ones, and that of men’s wives we still can write as the most eloquent divine who ever lived, Jeremy Taylor, wrote, “A good wife is Heaven’s last, best gift to man—­his angel and minister of graces innumerable—­his gem of many virtues—­his casket of jewels.  Her voice is sweet music—­her smiles his brightest day—­her kiss the guardian of his innocence—­her arms the pale of his safety, the balm of his health, the balsam of his life—­her industry his surest wealth—­her economy his safest steward—­her lips his faithful counselors—­her bosom the softest pillow of his cares—­and her prayers the ablest advocate of Heaven’s blessings on his head.”