In this is comprised all woman’s duties, and they are paramount; for upon their successful application depend the well-being of society and the proper and healthful administration of wise and salutary laws.  The world is indebted to woman for all that is good and great.  Let every woman emulate Cornelia, the Roman mother, and, when a giddy, foolish neighbor runs to her to exhibit newly purchased jewels, be found, like the Roman matron, at her tambour-work; and like her, too, when her boys from school shall run to embrace her, say to the thoughtless one, “These are my jewels!” and Rome will not alone boast of her Gracchi and their incomparable mother.

The duties of home cultivate reflection and stimulate to virtue.  For this reason, women are more pious than men; and for this reason, too, they are more eminent in purity.  Contact with the domestic circle does not contaminate or corrupt, as the baser contact with the world is sure to do.

The home circle is select and chaste—­the promiscuous intermingling with the world meretricious and contaminating.  The mother not trained to the appreciation and discharge of the domestic duties, was never the mother of a great representative mind; because she is incapable of imparting those stern principles of exalted morality and fixity of purpose essential in forming the character of such men.  The mother of Cincinnatus was a farmer’s wife; of Leonidas, a shepherdess; and the mothers of Washington, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, William H, Crawford, and Andrew Jackson were all the wives of farmers—­rural and simple in their pursuits, distinguished for energy and purity; constant in their principles, and devoted to husband, home, and children.  They never dreamed it was woman’s vocation or duty to go out into the world and mingle in its strifes and contentions—­but at home, to view them, reflect upon their consequences to society, and upon the future of their sons and daughters, and warn them what to emulate and what to shun.  They, as did their husbands, felt the necessity of preserving that delicacy of thought and action which is woman’s ornament, and which is more efficient in rebuking licentiousness and profligacy in the young and the old than all the teaching of the schools without such example.  Such were the mothers of the great and the good of our land, and such the mothers of those men now prominent and distinguished in the advocacy and support of the great principles of natural rights and humanity.

It is a mooted question whether the purposes of human life demand a high, classical education among the masses; or whether the general happiness is promoted by such education.  In the study of the human mind in connection with human wants, we are continually met with difficulties arising from the want of education; and quite as frequently with those resulting from education.  So much so, that we hear from every wise man the declaration that as many minds are ruined by over-education as from the want of education.