Year: 1860

If there is any feature of American society
which cries more loudly than any other for re-
form that feature par e1celtcnce is the system of
filtration carried on by married women. Nine
tenths of all the divorce suits brought by hus-
bands against their wives for criminality can be
traced directly to innocent Irritation" And the
weak victim of an elopement almost invariably
can look back to her first error as committed at
the time when she received the attention of an
other than her husband. These 6 innocent fir
tations " of married women are the denominations
of moder society, and tend directly to subvert
the domestic relations as visiting tippling shops
does to drunkenness. Sidney Smith says, Show
me woman W ho will not blush while displaying
her beauty, grace, charms, and you will have
shown whose virtues hang upon a thread
which a word will cut" There are some women
who can always see in the many who surround
them in their comminglings with society certain
attractive points in others that their experience
tells them are not possessed by their husbands,
and whenever they discern one of these apparent
excelencies in others they sure to see a cor
responding deficiency at home Forgetting that
none are perfect, such women are apt to magnify
mole-hills of faults into mountains of crimes. An
uneasness therefore, takes possession of them,
and they think over their husbands defects until
their happiness is destroyed, and they are pre-
pared to receive the attentions of all those who
approach them, hoping and expecting to find a
congeniaity which their own imaginations have
convinced them is essential to happiness This
disquietude is heightened when thev consider





cations which cannot be severed. and as society,"
though guilty of the same failings, perhaps,
equally with him, will not look with complacen-
cy upon them in receiving familiar attentions in
public, eiandestine meetings are next in consider
alton, and honor and virtue yield willing prey
to perverted judgments and sensual appettes-
The wife seeks to keepfr her husbands knowl-
edge of her preference for another, until from her
too oft repeated intimacies with others her heart
is utterly estranged from him. Then, actuated
by guilt alone, feeling herself debased beyond re-
demption, she throws off the cloak of privacy and
emerges into the world an outcast, despised and
Stunned by those perhaps equally as guilty, and
by society at large. Is proof of this needed Are
not elepements the order of the day Are they not
coming to be more prevalent than any other spe-
cies of crime Divorces by the dozen are the
common occurrence, and society is continually
nauseated with the tales of guilt brought to light
by the newspapers and the courts We are not
sure there is any remedy for this state of things
as long as parents persist in training I'D their
daughters in idleness, and sons in luxury, and
effeminacy- utterly ignorant of the true aim and
object of existence,-with only parlor education
for the first and fast-life - for the otber-hav
ing no greater than to carefully fit their
daughters in expensive appearance for the matri-
monlal market and 10 establish their sons in
Z" positions amongst the corrupt surroundings of
fashionable society, thus giving to both an out
side show which is entirely at war with the real
business of life.