SELF-DEPENDENCE.
Fashionable education. Why there is so little self-dependence in the world. Why orphans sometimes make out well in the world. Error corrected. What young women once were. What they are now. The best character formed under difficulties. Cause of the present helpless condition of females. Three or four to get breakfast. Modes of breaking up these habits. Anecdote of an independent young woman. Appeal to the reader.
Here, again, our fashionable modes of education are wrong; and here, too, almost every young woman who is determined on improvement, has a great work to perform.
It is one of the most difficult things in the world—perhaps it is one of the impossibles—to bring up children amid comforts and conveniences, and yet at the same time to cultivate in them the habit of self-dependence—or, as some would call it, the habit of independence.
And yet nothing is more true, than that human character has always, with few if any exceptions, been most fully developed and most harmoniously and healthfully formed, amid difficulties. Mr. M'Clure, the distinguished geologist, whose opportunities for observation in the world have been very great, says that orphans, as a general rule, make their way best in the world. Without claiming for myself so many years of observation, by thirty or forty, as this distinguished veteran in natural science, I should be glad to make one modification of his conclusion, before adopting it as my own. I would say, that the misfortune of having no parents at all, is scarcely greater than that of having over-indulgent ones; and that the number of those who are spoiled by indulgence, is greater than the number of those who are spoiled by being made orphans.
It cannot be that an institution ordained by Heaven as one of its first laws, should so completely fail in accomplishing its design—that of blessing mankind—as Mr. M'Clure represents. It cannot be that parents, as a general rule, are a misfortune. Such a belief is greatly erroneous.
The truth is, that when we look about us and see so many spoiled, who appear to be well bred, our attention is so exclusively directed to these strange, but, in a dense population, frequently occurring cases, that we begin, ere long, to fancy the exception to be the general rule. And again, when we see here and there an orphan—and in a population like ours, quite a multitude in the aggregate—making her way well in the world, we are liable to make another wrong conclusion, and to say that her success belongs to the general rule, when it is only an exception to it.
Nevertheless—and I have no wish to conceal the fact—it is extremely difficult, if not dangerous, to attempt to form good and useful character in the lap of ease and indulgence. There needs privation and hard struggle, to develope the soul and the body. Even Zion, the city of our God, is represented in Scripture as recruiting her inhabitants only by throes and agonies.
Let it not be thought, then, that our young women in New England—a land of comparative ease, quiet and affluence—can be brought up as they ought to be, without much pains-taking. A century ago, things were, in this respect, more favorable. Then there were struggles; and these were the means of forming a race of men and women, of whom the world might have been proud. Then the young women knew how to take care of themselves; and having been taught how to take care of themselves, they knew how to take care of others.
But "times are altered." Thousands of young women—and the same is true of young men—are trained from the very cradle, scarcely to know any thing of want or difficulty. All is comparative ease, and comfort, and quiet around them; and they are led by ease and indulgence to love to have it so. They are trained, as I have elsewhere said, to depend on the world and its inhabitants for their happiness—not to originate happiness and diffuse it. They are trained, in effect, to believe that happiness, or blessedness, consists—contrary to the saying of our Lord and Saviour—in receiving; not in giving.