III.

"THE OPENING OF THE GATES."

"If such a day never come, then I perceive much else will never come; heroic purity of heart and of eye, noble, pious valor to amend us and the age of bronze and lacquer, — how can they ever come?"T. CARLYLE.

10 destroy daughters is to make war upon Heaven's harmony. The more daughters you drown, the more daughters you will have; and never was it known that the drowning of daughters led to the birth of

sons."

This passage from the treatise of Kwei Chunk Fu, upon Infanticide, may be translated so as to apply to every Christian nation. The Chinese are not the only people who drown daughters. England, France, and America, the three leading intelligences of the world, are busy at it this moment. The

cold, pure wave of the Pacific is a sweeter draught than that social flood of corruption and depression, which, like a hideous quicksand, buries your sisters out of your sight. "The more daughters you drown, the more daughters you will have." Most certainly; and if, instead of the word " daughters," you insert the words "weak and useless members of society," which is what the Chinese mean by it, you will see that Kwei Fu is right. Let women starve; let them sink into untold depths of horror, without one effort to save them; and, for every woman so lost, two shall be born to inherit her fate.

Nor need the careless and ignorant man of wealth fancy that his own daughters shall escape while he continues heartlessly indifferent, though he never actively wronged a human creature. When the spoiler is abroad, he does not pause to choose his victims. The fairest and most innocent may be the first struck down; for human passions find their fitting type in the persecuted beast of the

forest. It is not the hunter alone who feels his teeth and talons, but the first human flesh his lawless members seize.

If these things are so, surely it is our duty to consider well this question of work, to suggest all possible modes of relief, and, while waiting for the final application of absolute principles, to help society forward by all partial measures of amelioration; for only partial can they be, so long as the present modes of thought and feeling continue. How little any one person can contribute toward the solution of our difficulties, I am well aware; yet I venture to make a few suggestions.

The "Edinburgh Review," whether prepared to recommend female preachers and lecturers or not, does propose women as teachers of Oratory; and says distinctly, that, for this purpose, they are to be preferred to men, as their voices are more penetrating, distinct, delicate, and correct than those of men. I think it was a matter of surprise to American audiences, when women first came forward as

public speakers, that, in so large a number of cases, the parlor tone would reach to the extremity of a large hall. Women, too, were heard at a disadvantage, because popular curiosity compelled them to speak in the largest buildings. There are a great many women, and there are also a great many men, whose voices are wholly unfit for public exigencies; but, when you consider that women have been wholly untrained so far, how great do their natural advantages appear! Several female teachers of elocution in our midst prove that this is gradually perceived. These remarks should be extended so as to cover all instruction in the pronunciation of languages. There may be men capable of distinguishing the delicate shades of sound, so that a woman's voice can catch them; but such men are rare exceptions to the common incompetency. The French nasals cannot be distinguished accurately by a man's voice: the bass tone is too broad, and the treble wavers in trying to find the middle rest.

Pursue the study of Italian for years with the best teacher that Boston can furnish; and, when you first hear a cultivated Italian woman speak, you will find that you have the whole thing to learn over again. So there was never any teacher of the French language equal to Rachel, whose nimble and fiery tongue never dropped an unmeaning accent nor tone; nor of the English likę Fanny Kemble, who, despite certain “ stage tricks," in vogue since the days of Garrick, shows us what delicate shades of meaning lie hidden in the vowel sounds, and what power a slight variation of a flexible voice confers upon a dull passage. The teaching of oratory and of language, then, should devolve upon woman.

"why

"Why," asks Ernest Legouvé, should not the immense variety of bureaucrative and administrative employments be given up to women?" Under this head would come the business inspection of hospitals, barracks, prisons, factories, and the like; and the