"There is not enough thought, and time, and consideration devoted to this
inevitable requisite, love. It is kept too much in the background. How
many years are given to preparing young people for professions, trades,
and occupations; how much counsel and advice are heaped around these
topics; and yet how little importance is attached to the very influence
which will probably be the turning-point of their lives. No wonder there
are so many unhappy marriages. If we could only remember that boys and
girls are not to be educated for lawyers, merchants, school-teachers, or
housekeepers alone, but for husbands and wives, as well."
Those girls are the most chaste and ladylike who have been brought up with
a family, or neighborhood, or school of boys; and on the other hand, those
boys who have from their earliest days been accustomed to female restraint
and girlhood's influences, make the best men, and most faithful, loving
husbands and fathers.
What shall I say of those demoralizing institutions where the "young
ladies" are taught algebra, languages, and ill manners? Where they are
forbidden to recognize a gentleman in the school-room, prayer-room, or
street? Can you, honest reader, believe there are such institutions in our
enlightened land? Yet there are; where the sexes are denied not only the
association with, but are forbidden the common courtesies of life; where,
if a friend or brother lifts his hat to the young lady, while belonging to
that institution, she is forbidden to acknowledge the courtesy.
I remember Mrs. Brandyball, in one of Theodore Hook's novels of society,
boasting of her seminary for young ladies as one of the _safest_ in the
world, being entirely surrounded by a dense wall, eight feet high,
surmounted by sharp spikes and broken glass bottles. I reckon all the
virtue preserved in this way was not worth the cost of its defences.