is good which alienates parents and children. Let home then be made agreeable and attractive. Let woman be educated and accomplished, and this most important end is secured.

Woman has a right to be well educated, because it secures her social position. When she is so, it is no longer possible for husbands and brothers to treat her as an inferior. They will find in her a counsellor and companion, to advise and sustain them in their difficulties, to cheer them in their solitude, to be the ornament of their prosperity, and to draw from misfortune its sharpest sting. The education of woman is the surest safeguard against barbarism and vice. Educated and accomplished mothers do more to build up and sustain families than the most gifted and successful fathers. The talents and eminence of fathers too often give a social standing to children of which they are totally unworthy, and which, as they suppose, renders all personal merit and exertion superfluous. Worse than this, too of ten upon the strength of hereditary fame or wealth, they transgress every law of morality, and set at defiance those restraints which public opinion throws around the young, who are to be dependent on personal character.

Nothing can counteract this fatal tendency but a judicious mother. She, by great watchfulness and perpetual exertion, may form the sentiments of her children, and set their habits in such a direction as to keep them in the straight and narrow path of personal merit.

In

There remains but one more topic which I intended to discuss in the present lecture, the security of woman's rights of property. the lowest state of woman's condition she is a slave, incapable of holding property, being property herself. She is sold as property by her parents, and bought as property by her husband. Having a slave's condition, she has a slave's treatment. The next stage is to make her free to dispose of herself. This elevates her by making her equal in the original contract of marriage. In the legal arrangements of most nations, even the most civilized, there is a remnant of the old barbarism in merging the wife's rights of property in those of her husband. This is intrinsically unjust and impolitic. There is no more justice in making the property of the wife the property of her husband, than in making the property of the husband to belong to the wife. In some respects it is less politic. The

wife is much the more helpless of the two, on the occurrence of any accident, and ought, therefore, to be doubly guarded against loss and destitution.

The inequality of the rights of woman in property, it is to be feared, had its origin in the same cause with the right of primogeniture, in the power of the strongest, and in the fact, that men, not women, have always been legislators. Some civilians tell us, that the right of primogeniture was merely giving to the oldest son, peaceably, and by law, what he would have taken by force or fraud, from the younger and more defenceless members of the family. So the property of women has been given to their husbands, because they would have it at any rate. This is a poor account to give of the matter, but it is probably the best of which it is capable.

Another ostensible reason is, the danger of creating a separate interest between husband and wife. This is a danger a danger indeed, for nothing is so sure to give rise to alienation of affection as opposition, or even an imagined opposition, of interest. Many a marriage has been the source of untold misery, by the

unwise arrangement of a separate purse. There is wisdom then, perhaps, in the apparent injustice of placing the income of the wife's property at the disposal of the husband. If it were not so, every husband and wife, who were both possessed of means, would have the power to separate and maintain their own establishments, the very worst possible condition of things that can be conceived. In Europe, where such arrangements are common, the greatest abuses and scandals are the consequence. Marriage, under such conditions, becomes a by-word and a jest.

While then the woman, though she have a natural right to enjoy the income of her own property, may wisely submit to the present arrangement that her husband should control the revenue; yet she ought to insist on the settlement of her property on herself. It is her duty to him, as well as to herself. In such a country as ours especially, where speculation and hazard are universal, and the possessor of hundreds of thousands to-day, may be wholly destitute to-morrow, it becomes important that whatever property the wife has, should not be swept away in the wreck of her husband's fortunes. Many families have

been saved, by this wise forecast, from utter poverty and dependence.

Nearly connected with the rights of woman in property, and the justice of securing it from the imprudence or dishonesty of her husband, comes the claim she has to just compensation for her labor. There is no more melancholy fact in the whole history of civilization, than the lowness of woman's wages in those nations who boast themselves as the most refined. In this respect, extremes seem to meet; and in utter barbarism, and the highest perfection of the arts and sciences, woman is made a slave. She toils not for a just share of the avails of universal labor, but for a bare support; and even where Christianity has its fullest sway, woman gets for the most untiring industry, not a support, but commiseration.

There are many reasons for this, which do not lie on the surface, and which must always be taken into the account. Mankind are supported by the income of property and the wages of labor. Where there is a thin population in proportion to the soil, there wages will be high, because there is much to be done, and only a few people to do it. The products of the soil will be cheap, because