Yorkville Enquirer

MAN'S DUTY TO WOMAN.

Let him learn to be grateful to woman for this undoubted achievement of her sex, that it is she—she far more than he and she too often in despite of him—who has kept Christendom from lapsing back into barbarism—kept mercy and truth from being utterly overborne by those two greedy monsters—money and war. Let him be grateful for this, that almost every great soul that has led forward or lifted up the race has been furnished for each nobler deed, and inspired with each patriotic and holy aspiration, by the retiring fortitude of some Spartan, or more than Spartan—some Christian mother. Moses, the deliverer of his people, drawn out of the Nile by the King's daughter, some one has hinted, is only a symbol of the way that woman's better instincts always outwit the tyrannical diplomacy of man.

Let him cheerfully remember, that though the sinewy sex achieves enterprises on public theatre, it is the nerve and sensibility of the other that arm the mind and inflame the soul in secret. "A man discovered America, but a woman equipped the voyage." So everywhere; man executes the performance, but woman trains the man. Every effectual person, leaving his mark on the world, is but another Columbus, for whose furnishing some Isabella, in the form of his mother, lays down her jewelry, her vanities, and her comfort.

Above all let not man practice upon woman the perpetual and shameful falsehood of pretending admiration and acting contempt. Let them not exhaust their kindness in adorning her person, and ask in return the humiliation of her soul. Let them not assent to her every high opinion, as if she were not strong enough to maintain it against opposition; nor yet manufacture opinion for her, and force it on her lips, by dictation. Let them not crucify her emotions, nor ridicule her frailty, nor crush her individuality, nor insult her dependence, nor play off mean jests upon her honor in convivial companies, nor bandy unclean doubts of her, as a wretched substitute for wit; nor whisper vulgar suspicions of her purity, which, as compared with their own, is like the immaculate whiteness of angels. Let them remember that, for the ghastly spectacle of her blasted charity, they are answerable. Let them multiply her social advantages, enhance her dignity, minister to her intelligence, and, by manly gentleness, be the champions of her genius, the friends of her fortunes, and the equals if they can, of her heart.—Rev. F. D. Huntington.