predict an abundant supply of highly-trained educators to the duties of our sex, if the appropriate facilities, such as college professors obtain, were offered to them. But to take such a post as I now occupy, or to become a hard-working, ill-paid subordinate, or to become a family assistant, would not tempt them from present advantages of usefulness, independence, and comfort.
The present agitation as to woman's rights and wrongs is the natural and necessary result of the want of appreciation and neglect of the claims and duties of the family state. It is the manifest design of our Creator that each man should seek a wife and establish a family. And the family state has two ends to be accomplished; one is the increase and perpetuity of our race, and the other is its education and training; not chiefly to enjoy this life, but mainly to form a character that will secure endless happiness in the life to come.
The distinctive feature of the family state is, the training of a small number by self-sacrificing
labor and love. Abraham, the friend of God, and the great model of faith and obedience to both Jews and Christians, was not allowed to have a child of his own till he had trained six hundred servants, each man dwelling in his tent with a family of his own, forming a religious community that obeyed the true God. This shows that it was not for personal gratification as the chief end that God instituted the family, and that those who are childless may have as great a work to perform as the parental.
But the more our nation has advanced in wealth and civilization, the more have the labors and the duties of the family state been shunned. Many virtuous young men are withheld from it from the incompetence and the extravagant habits and tastes of those they would otherwise seek for wives. Another class is withheld by guilty courses that destroy the hope of family love and purity. Another large class shun the toil, self-denial, and trials of married life, and prefer their ease and the many other enjoyments wealth will secure.
To these add the hundreds of thousands of
young men who perished in our destructive war, and the emigration to new settlements where early marriage is impracticable, and as the consequence, the census shows hundreds of thousands of women who can never commence the family state as wife and mother. This is the great emergency that agitates society and forms the chief moral problem of our age. The question in its simplest form is this, What is to be done to secure the highest usefulness and happiness of woman as a sex, when marriage and the family state are more and more passing away? Our customs and our laws are all framed on the assumption that women are to be supported by husbands to rear up families; and yet marriage and the family state are more and more avoided. And what is the remedy to be sought? Will the ballot relieve this difficulty? Can any laws be enforced that will oblige men to marry? and if not, what are we to do to meet the emergency?
In reply, I will first state some important facts developed here in Massachusetts, where well-educated marriageable women most abound; not
in employments for which God designed them, but in shops and mills and employment detrimental both to health and morals.
The report of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities states that the present mode of collecting special classes of the helpless, the unfortunate, and the vicious into great establishments, managed by paid agents, is not the best method to secure their physical, moral, and social improvement, and that it involves many unfortunate influences.