"There are many advantages in leaving all these questions, as now, to the States. Local self-government more readily permits of experiments on mooted questions, which are the outcome of the needs and convictions of the community. The smaller the area over which legislation extends, the more pliable are the laws. By leaving the States free to experiment in their local affairs, we can judge of the working of different laws under varying circumstances, and thus learn their comparative merits. The progress education has achieved in America is due to the fact that we have left our system of public instruction in the hands of local authorities. How different would be the solution of the great educational question of manual labor in the schools, if the matter had to be settled at Washington!
"The whole nation might find itself pledged to a scheme that a few years would prove wholly impracticable. Not only is the town meeting, as Emerson says, 'the cradle of American liberties,' but it is the nursery of Yankee experiment and wisdom. England, with its clumsy national code of education, ****** one inflexible standard of scholarship for the bright children of the manufacturing districts and the dull brains of the agricultural counties, should teach us a lesson as to the wisdom of keeping apart state and national government.
"Before we can decide the just grounds for divorce, we must get a clear idea of what constitutes marriage. In a true relation the chief object is the loving companionship of man and woman, their capacity for mutual help and happiness and for the development of all that is noblest in each other. The second object is the building up a home and family, a place of rest, peace, security, in which child-life can bud and blossom like flowers in the sunshine.
"The first step toward ****** the ideal the real, is to educate our sons and daughters into the most exalted ideas of the sacredness of married life and the responsibilities of parenthood. I would have them give, at least, as much thought to the creation of an immortal being as the artist gives to his landscape or statue. Watch him in his hours of solitude, communing with great Nature for days and weeks in all her changing moods, and when at last his dream of beauty is realized and takes a clearly defined form, behold how patiently he works through long months and years on sky and lake, on tree and flower; and when complete, it represents to him more love and life, more hope and ambition, than the living child at his side, to whose conception and antenatal development not one soulful thought was ever given. To this impressible period of human life, few parents give any thought; yet here we must begin to cultivate virtues that can alone redeem the world.
"The contradictory views in which woman is represented are as pitiful as varied. While the Magnificat to the Virgin is chanted in all our cathedrals round the globe on each returning Sabbath day, and her motherhood extolled by her worshipers, maternity for the rest of womankind is referred to as a weakness, a disability, a curse, an evidence of woman's divinely ordained subjection. Yet surely the real woman should have some points of resemblance in character and position with the ideal one, whom poets, novelists, and artists portray.
