Year: 1869

When we consider that every mistress of a
household is continually buying, if not selling
that she is continually hiring and employing Ia
Dor. in the form of servants ; and very often,
into the bargain keeping herhusband saccounts
| cannot but think her hard worked brain might
be clearer and her ha-d-tried desire to do her
duty by every subject in her little kingdom,
night be more easily satisfied had she read some
thing Of what John Stuart Mill has written, es-
pecially on the duties of employer and employed.
A capitalist, commercialist an employer Of Ia
bor and accountant-everv mistress of a
household is all these, whether she likes it or
not; and it would be surely well for her, in so
very complicated state of society this, not
to trust merely to that mother wit, that intuitve
sagacity and innate power of ruling her fellow
creatures, which carries women so nobly through
their work in simpler and less civilized societies.


And here stop to answer those who may say,
as have heard it said that woman's intellect
is not fit for business that when Il woman takes
to business she is apt to do it i'll, and unpleas-
antly likewise ; TO be more suspicious, more rri-
table, more grasping, more unreasonable than
regular men of business would be; that, as |
have heard it put, ga woman does not fight
fair" The answer is simple. That a woman S
intellect is eminentv fitted for business is proved
by the enormous amount of business she gets
through without any special training for it but
those faults in a woman of which some men COM
plain simply the results of her not having
had special training. She does not know the
laws of business. She does not hnow the rules
of the game she is playing, and therefore she is
playing it in the dark, in fear and suspicion !; apt
to judge of questions personal grounds often,
offending those with whom she has to do and
oftener still making herself miserable over mat
tiers of law or of business, on which little sound
knowledge would set her head and her heart at
rest.





stance, would teach many women that by shut
ting themselves up day after day, week after
week, ir darkened rooms, they certainly
committing a waste of health destroying their
vital energy and diseasing their brains, if they
were taking poison the whole time. little
knowledge of the laws of heat would teach
women not to clothe themselves and thrir chill
dren after foolish and insuffc cent fashions, which
in this climate sow the seeds of a dozen different
diseases, and have to be atoned for by perpetual
anxieties and by perpetual doctors bills and as
for little knowledge of the laws of electricity,
one thrift am sure it would produce-thrift 10
us men of having to answer continual inquiries
as to what the weather is going to be, when a
slight knowledge of the barometer, or of the form
of the clouds and the direction of the wind
would enable many lady to judge for herself,
and not after inquiry on inquiry, disregard all
warnings 60 out on the first appearance of a
strip OF blue sky, and come home wet through,
with what she calls q only chill, - but which
really means nail driven into her cofIin-a
probable shortening, though it may be very
small one of her mortal life, because the fool of
the next twenty-four hours, which should have
gone to keep the vital heat at its normal stan
dard, will have to be wasted in raising it up to
that standard from which it has fallen by chill


If be told that it is natural fault of women
that they cannot take the calm, judicial view of
matters which men boast, and often boast most
wrongly that they can take-that under the in
huence of hope, fear, delicate antpathy, honest
moral indignation, they will let their eyes and
ears be governed by their feelings, and see and
hear only what they wish to see and hear;
answer-that it is not for me as man to start
such theory; but that if it be true, it is an ad-
ditional argument for some education which will
correct this supposed natural defect. And say
deliberately that there is but one sort of educa-
ton which will correct it one which will teach
young women to observe facts accurately, judge
them calmly, describe them carefully without
adding or distorting, and that is, some training
IN natural science.-Reo. Charles K,ngslep.