regions of sentiment and imagination. I can only say in my defence, that nothing is prosaic, which concerns human hearts and human happiness Woman is made to live in the regions of the sentiments and imagination. Her sorrows and her joys are there. It is they which to her clothe the dull affairs of this every day life with an interest unknown to the rougher sex. And she herself is the very poetry of the world.

LECTURE III.

ON THE SPHERE AND DUTIES OF WOMAN.

N MY last lecture I gave a general outline of the distinguishing characteristics, the sphere and influence of woman. It will be the object of the present lecture to point out her privileges and her trials. I shall examine the charges which are current in the world against the sex, and show the cause and manner of her failure, whenever she does fail, to accomplish that high destiny to which she was appointed.

And I commence by saying, that every American woman ought to thank God every day of her existence, that she was born in this country, and at the present period. The happiness of her being depends more on outward

circumstances than that of the other sex. Man's greater power of action and endurance makes him more at home in all conditions and all

periods of the world. Man in a state of barbarism can be as rough and as barbarous as his associates. In the absence of law and

moral restraints he can defend himself. In the absence of physical comfort he can appropriate to himself the best that is to be had. But without law, without moral and religious restraint, without physical comfort, the condition of woman is wretched indeed. Her more delicate frame, and the care of infancy and childhood, which every where falls to her lot, expose her to greater suffering from the want of physical comforts; the ruder the cabin, the more scantily it is supplied with the necessary furniture for cooking, warming, and repose, the more pitiable is her condition. And where there is no law but individual will, whatever wrong is inflicted, she is generally the sufferer. Her lot varies then, in different ages, precisely with the progress of civilization. In the United States civilization, including in that term physical comfort and abundance with the subjection of society to the restraints of morality and religion, has reached a greater perfection than has any

The

where else been known. Woman, for the reasons I have already stated, is more interested than man in the progress of the arts. labors of the field remain much the same from age to age, but the two processes of grinding meal by machinery, and spinning and weaving by the power of steam and water, have liberated millions of female hands from the dullest drudgery, and from the slavery of perpetual toil. And that conquest of law and justice, which marks the last stage in the progress of human rights, which gives man but one wife and thus makes her his equal, and his companion, does more for her elevation than any political change which any civil revolution has ever accomplished for man. To make the American woman happy in her lot, no matter what that lot may be, she has only to read the history of past ages, and make herself acquainted with the present condition of the world. Let her cast her eyes upon the map of the globe and survey Asia, the cradle of the human race. History will tell her that that vast continent was filled with inhabitants and poured out her armed millions upon the West before the forests of Europe had been penetrated by the foot of civilization. While

the countries which now constitute Spain, France, England, Germany, and Russia, were an unbroken wilderness, and America was utterly unknown, the banks of the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Ganges were thronged with a crowded population, and China herself numbered nearly as many inhabitants as the rest of Asia. From that day to this there has been no falling off in numbers, and we may safely say, that in Asia have lived two-thirds of the human race; and not one of all the millions of the female sex who have existed there, has enjoyed what are now considered the natural and unalienable rights of woman. Europe was little better till the introduction of Christianity. Tacitus, it is true, speaks of the higher estimation in which the ancient Germans held their women, and there was undoubtedly a greater respect paid her by the rude barbarians of the North than had ever been exhibited in Asia or Southern Europe. What woman is at the present day as the friend and equal of man, she owes entirely to Christianity and the doctrine of immortality which accompanies it. It is only the respect for her, generated by the belief of her possessing an immortal and responsible soul like