RELATION OF AGRICULTURE TO THE STATE. 45 



higher, were careful from the beginning to provide that their 

 citizens should not be such as wore capable of meddling with 

 any action that was base or vile. We, living remote from public 

 haunts, have the best opportunity to bring up our families in 

 habits of virtue and orderly industry. We can instil into the 

 minds of our children the graces of simplicity, truth and honesty, 

 and rare will be the instances in which these inculcations, if 

 properly and early implanted, will be departed from. Upon 

 these characteristics all other education may be engrafted ; with- 

 out them, the latter will be but the fringe without the garment. 



Boys and girls want, above all, a good home education to start 

 with. Labor in this hemisphere is honorable to all classes, and 

 we have opportunities above all other classes of society of teach- 

 ing our children the value of industry on the farm and in the 

 house. A distinguished authoress (Mrs. Stowe,) has recently an- 

 nounced herself an advocate for the foreign system of having 

 public bakers, cooks, &c., in our villages, that the labors of our 

 households may be lightened. Far distant be the time of any 

 such innovations in our old-fashioned homely habits. What 

 the farm is as a school to the boy, the house is to the girl, and 

 we have enough women already in cities and towns who, devoid 

 of useful employment and of homes, find their time pass idly on 

 their hands and are enabled only to devise appliances to get rid of 

 the hard-earned money of their husbands on dress and gewgaws 

 of fashion. The daughters imitate the examples of the mothers, 

 and so expensive have the habits of those devotees of fashion 

 become, that among fortune hunters the proposition is seriously 

 maintained that the surest way to acquire a competency would 

 be to marry one of these mantua-maker's blocks, and sell her 

 clothes ! 



A witty woman, commenting on Mormonism, exclaimed : 

 " How absurd ! Four or five wives for one man ; when the fact 

 is, each woman in these times ought to have four or five husbands 

 to support her decently ! " 



The great want in male and female education is thoroughness. 

 We are taught too much book knowledge at once, and taught it 

 too early in life. A boy who has been brought up on a farm 

 during his tender years, with occasional attendance in winter at 

 the common school, is much more likely to acquire rapidly and 

 thoroughly subsequent knowledge, and attain eminence even in 



