CHAPTER X.
ON THE TRAINING OF BOYS.
It is scarcely possible to look at the heading of this chapter, without being struck with the wide range of important considerations which it necessarily embraces. The sphere in which man has to act is not more different from that in which woman finds her appointed duties, than the constitution of the mind of one is from that of the other. I say nothing here about superiority in one, and inferiority in the other; because I consider that to be an idle question, since nothing can be good, and consequently nothing can be superior, except in proportion as it answers the end for which it was created. There are writers, however, and not a few, in the present day, who maintain that both have equal powers, and are fitted for the same field of action.
Without endeavoring to combat an opinion so opposed at once to nature and religion, to philosophy and common sense, I would ask, whether women, who faithfully perform their duties, have not at present enough to do in their accustomed and familiar place? If mothers, wives, and mistresses of houses, have already enough to do as women, the inference is plain, that in proportion as they assume the duties of men, the nobler sex must be willing to take part in theirs, otherwise there must be a loss of useful exertion in that department where it can not well be spared. Wishing, therefore, to every man who advocates the ability and fitness of women to take part with men on equal terms in all public affairs, no worse wish, than that he may have a wife a member of parliament, and he himself obliged to stay at home and darn stockings; I will leave this subject with a short but appropriate passage from Miss Edgeworth, where, in speaking of temper, the author alludes to the appropriate position of woman, in her usually clear and forcible style:
"A man in a furious passion is terrible to his enemies, but a woman in a passion is disgusting to her friends; she loses the respect due to her sex, and she has not masculine strength and courage to enforce any other species of respect
