The new Northwest. [volume] (Portland, Or.) 1871-1887, 1873-08-22

golden candlesticks around the home
altar, are to emanate exclusively from
woman, while they have but to warm
and comfort themselves by these cheer
ful love-lights.
Shielded behind the reputation of
good husbands, and in the consciousness
of aiming to be such, a suspicion may
never have intruded for moment upon
their merit to the title III its largest and
fullest import. House, food, raiment,
all the comforts and appliances of life,
may have been freely and lavishly be-
slowed, and yet what is more priced by
true womanhood withheld, namely,
sympathy, attention, consideration in
life's daily wearying cares and duties,
and in petty trials. Start not in disgust,
lest it be asked of you to concede to her
an untried and unwomanly sphere of
action, or TO relinquish to her the scep-
ter Of legal and social supremacy which
amid the agitations and conventions of
the day you now grasp so feebly. Let
other pens plead for woman the unprac-
ticability of the extension of her sphere
and the augmentation of her duties and
burthens. Be mine the humber task of
asking tightening of her tolls, some
mitigation of her cares, more economy
in the trials daily made upon her
strength and nervous energy, the out
pouring of sustaining sympathy and
considerate help in her multifarious
wearing and exhausting duties. My
| plea is for woman as house-keeper,
mother, wife, nurse and teacher; for her
as the main-spring in the home ma
chinery, whose mornings press hard upon
the footsteps of MONDAY; whose name
less cares accumulate as the shadows of
evening invite men to respose; refresh
ment for her whose work it is to
respond to the multiform demand
of home and hospitality, of chill
dren and society; who keeps mid
night vigils with restless and sickly
childhoOd-while Natures sweet re-
storer" is renovating mans muscles and
nerves for less onerous duties; 1 would
plead for frail, sickly, care-worn moth
ers, who all over the length and breadth
of our country are yearly dropping by
thousands silently, mournfully away
into premature graves ere the first flush
of maturity has passed from their brows.
And | would whisper this plea in his
ear who is oftentimes slow to learn her
value, but in the bitter experience of
her loss, when his motherless ones call
in vain for her ministrations, and he
mourns in bitterness that those price
less services and energies were not more
carefully husbanded.
! The great Hungarian orator says !:
| ''rhe petty pangs of small daily cares
have often bent the character of man."
Thrice often have they that of woman,
and bent her form and robbed her
cheeks of their youthful bloom before
life's noon deprives her spirit of its
| freshness and her heart of its ardor.
Far more wronged has she been by
mans inapttude to sympathy and his
inattention to the real 10dIlts of her ma
ture-to what he may deem little things
than by a denial of cO-equality with
him in the public walks of life-more
crushed by unalleviated cares than by
the iron heel of his despotism. Far be
it from the writer to plead for woman
an exemption from the tolls and stern
self-denials of those who, with faces
heavenward, tread the cheekered and
thorny pathway Of an earthly pilgrim
age; but is it the design of Providence
that she should be as burthened with
cares of family and children as she is,
or that she should so early droop and
fade and pass away, leaving those cares
and burthens to others? Is there not
much that is wrong, first in physical
/ training and next in the exaction and
claims of society and family, much ne
glect and shOrt-sightedness in the legal
and self-constituted head? His was a
misc policy as well as thoughtful af-
feetion who every year took his wife
from the confinement and cares of a
large family, sparing neither pains nor
expense to provide temporary care-tak-
ers for the little ones, and leaving his
large and pressing business, travelled
with her to remote and various places,
cheering, entertaining and drawing out
both mind and affections to himself:
then returning with her to her home,
refreshed in body and mind, composed
and invigorated in nervous energy, ex-
liberated and regenerated, so that she
could perform her life-work more effect
ually and thoroughly. When asked
how he could afford to leave has business,
he replied that he could not afford to
hare ms tUife 1CedF out. When COM
plained of for depriving his children of
maternal care, he said "they had better
miss that care few weeks in the year
than be deprived of it during whole
years of mOtherless life." All cannot
do as he did, but all can emulate his
spirit and apply his principles of sound
economy in such ways as Providence
may place within their reach.
NEAR SALEM, August 10, 1873.
WRIT OF SPECIAL ELECTION.