356 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



ify them for catching frivolous admirers, rather than for making good house 

 wives and well-qualified mothers. 



Entertaining these impressions, founded on no very limited observation, you 

 behold, gentle readers, the motives which will prompt us, and, as says the con- 

 veyancer, " be it known to all whom it may concern," to endeavor with what 

 success we may, so to conduct this, your department, as to mingle amusement 

 with instruction — instruction in other things besides cake and jumble making. 

 It is in the way thus indicated, by leading the housewife to understand that her 

 duties, when properly understood and appreciated, are as highly intellectual and 

 morally responsible as those of her husband — that there is a principle and a lit- 

 erature that belongs as much to the manufacture of butter and the cultivation of 

 the vine, as to any of his pursuits — that she can be brought to feel and to assert 

 the dignity of her position, and prepared to exchange the pleasures of intellectu- 

 al intercourse with her husband at the same time that she acquires confidence 

 and capacity to rival him in his outdoor management, and even to take that on 

 herself in case of his sickness or indispensable absence — too often at a cross-roads 

 militia mustering or partisan slang-whanging. Sorry are we here to say, as 

 truth requires, that an ill-judged, not to say cruel economy, too often leads hus- 

 bands to withhold from the wife the assistance indispensable to the comfortable 

 and successful management of the duties assigned her, and this want of the re- 

 quisite aid and convenience, be it said, is much more remarkable in the country, 

 where the housewife's duties are more complex, and the sphere of them much 

 more extensive than in town ; and herein may be recognized another of the nu. 

 merous and powerful attractions ever drawing people from the country to the cit- 

 ies. Not long since, we remember, on a visit to a Lunatic Asylum, in a north- 

 ern city, renowned, justly, for the humanity of its discipline and the economy 

 and success of its administration, we inquired of the accomplished physician in 

 charge of it, from what particular class of society came the largest proportion of 

 his patients ; and the painfulness of his reply will never be forgotten, could we 

 live to the age of Methuselah : " They come," said he, " from the class of young 

 married women, after their second and third child." Often, added he, their hus- 

 bands, eager for the pittance of gain, not satisfied with devolving on them the 

 toils and care of their own household and family proper, take in boarders besides, 

 who work in the neighboring factories, and for whom also the wife has to cook, 

 and otherwise labor — and thus, between child-bearing, nursing, and accumulated 

 drudgery and anxieties, their minds break, even before their constitutions, and 

 the poor woman, who but a few short years before had resigned father and mo- 

 ther, and sisters and brothers, to cling unto him who promised to love and to cher- 

 ish her, becomes the victim of a niggardly economy, and is lodged as a maniac 

 in a lunatic asylum, leaving her poor children to struggle with a destiny, if pos- 

 sible, more perilous and sad than her own. True, in that asylum, as at Balti- 

 more, under the unfailing and enlightened benevolence of a Stuart, the patients 

 are felt and cared for, as all should be who are thus bereft of that greatest boon 

 of the Almighty power — their reasoning faculties. But alas, what can •' min- 

 ister to a mind diseased ? " 



We cannot close this, as we fear it has appeared a rather tedious homily on the 

 condition and cares of the housewife in the country, without a word on that 

 word so much misunderstood — education ! In the general if not literal applica- 

 tion, it is understood to be that portion of knowledge acquired within the walls 

 of a school-house, under the instruction too often of rude and ignorant peda- 



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