to put their money into a hole in Colorado, and if by the most skillful machinery the sunken money can not be brought up again, prove to them, that it was eternally decreed that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the most orthodox and heavenly style.  Oh, the damnable schemes that professed Christians will engage in until God puts His fingers into the collar of the hypocrite’s robe and strips it clear down to the bottom!  You have no right, because you are well off, to conclude that your children are going to be as well off.  A man died leaving a large fortune.  His son fell dead in a Philadelphia grog-shop.  His old comrades came in and said as they bent over his corpse:  “What is the matter with you, Boggsey?” The surgeon standing over him said:  “Hush ye!  He is dead!” “Oh, he is dead,” they said.  “Come, boys; let us go and take a drink in memory of poor Boggsey!” Have you nothing better than money to leave your children?  If you have not, but send your daughters into the world with empty brain and unskilled hand, you are guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide, infanticide.

There are women toiling in our cities for two and three dollars per week who were the daughters of merchant princes.  These suffering ones now would be glad to have the crumbs that once fell from their fathers’ table.  That worn-out, broken shoe that she wears is the lineal descendant of the twelve-dollar gaiters in which her mother walked; and that torn and faded calico had ancestry of magnificent brocade that swept Broadway clean without any expense to the street commissioners.  Though you live in an elegant residence and fare sumptuously every day, let your daughters feel it is a disgrace to them not to know how to work.  I denounce the idea prevalent in society that, though our young women may embroider slippers and crochet and make mats for lamps to stand on without disgrace, the idea of doing anything for a livelihood is dishonorable.  It is a shame for a young woman belonging to a large family to be inefficient when the father toils his life away for her support.  It is a shame for a daughter to be idle while her mother toils at the wash-tub.  It is as honorable to sweep the house, make beds or trim hats as it is to twist a watch-chain.

As far as I can understand, the line of respectability lies between that which is useful and that which is useless.  If women do that which is of no value, their work is honorable.  If they do practical work, it is dishonorable.  That our young women may escape the censure of doing dishonorable work, I shall particularize.  You may knit a tidy for the back of an arm-chair, but by no means make the money wherewith to buy the chair.  You may with a delicate brush beautify a mantel ornament, but die rather than earn enough to buy a marble mantel.  You may learn artistic music until you can squall Italian, but never sing “Ortonville” or “Old Hundred.”  Do nothing practical if you would in the eyes of refined society preserve your respectability.  I scout these fine notions.  I tell you a woman, no more than a man, has a right to occupy a place in this world unless she pays a rent for it.