useful channels, Thus society is equally benefited and continually improved by the guardian character of the one portion of its population, and by the spirit and impetuosities of the other; and thus its various classes are made, by the planned and secret mechanism of our social economy, to be the continual instruments of practical good to each other, from the very circumstances of their arrangement and position, however unintended or unperceived by themselves such a consequence may be.

"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."*

It has been an interesting part of the Divine system of the living world that there should be so many children in it. These peculiarly embellish it. They may even compete with the female world for the beauty and pleasantness which they add to it. If we were to compare society, in its diversified forms, to the varieties of the vegetable kingdom, though we might rank youth as the nutritious and succulent plants, mature life as the fruit-bearing trees, and age as the venerable forest, we should still more justly deem children to be the flowers of social life. Too young to be useful, yet always pleasing, at

* I cannot close this letter without citing another passage from Sir Robert Peel's exhortation, because it so eloquently describes the means and qualities to which youth will always owe its most certain success. "It is incumbent on you to acquire those qualities which shall fit you for action rather than speculation. It is not, therefore, by mere study. by the mere accumulation of knowledge, that you can hope for eminence Mental discipline, the exercise of the faculties of the mind, the quickening of your apprehension, the strengthening of your memory, the forming of a sound, rapid, and discriminating judgment, are of even more importance than the store of learning.

"If you will consider these faculties as the most precious gifts of nature, and be persuaded that they are capable of constant progressive, and, therefore, almost of indefinite improvement; that, by acts similar to those by which great feats of bodily dexterity are performed, a capacity for the nobler feats of the mind may be acquired, the first object of your youth will be to establish that control over your own mind and habits which will ensure the proper cultivation of this precious inheritance. Try, even for a short period, the experiment of exercising such control. Practise the economy of time. Consider time, like the faculties of your mind, a precious estate; and that every moment of it, well applied, is put out to an exorbitant interest.

"When you have lived fifty years, you will have seen many instances in which the man who finds time for everything-for punctuality in all the relations of life; for the pleasures of society; for the cultivation of literature; for every rational amusement-is he who is most assiduous in the active pursuits of his profession."

tractive, and interesting, whenever rightly and kindly trained and taught; they form three fourths of a moiety of the living world; and from the age of birth to fourteen they are nearly half of it; and are fully so when, as in America, that half does not exceed fifteen years of age.

They are divisible into four distinct portions, each highly interesting, but with different qualities and attractions: the babe that feeds upon its parent, and requires her sustaining care; the infant that can walk and play, from its weaning to its fifth year; the growing child, beginning to bud into the future youth, and with many of its qualities, from five to ten; and that youth, with all its expanding bloom, which displays in new forms much that is interesting in childhood, with the developing nature of the future man. Each of these is in due proportion to the others; rather more than one third under five, another third under ten, and less than a third under fifteen.*

They have been specially designed to be in these graduating and succeeding forms; and they all present to us so many different modifications of human nature; so many different species of human beings; for although it is the same individual that grows up and passes from the one age and state into the other, yet, while they are in each period, they are distinct forms of human beings, with distinct qualities; each with a beauty and interestingness peculiar to itself, always harmonized and complete, though every year differing from

its former state.

But they must have been specially devised to be what they are, and a careful system and use of means must have been planned and executed to make them such. For that there are children at all, and such a train of different forms and ages, has arisen from and depends entirely upon the fixed laws of our growth, and upon these having been specifically chosen and settled to be what they are. For it would have been as easy to make a babe to enlarge into the perfect human being in one year as in fifteen or twenty. But the graduated enlargement, which is so interesting, has been preferred, in order to produce the pleasing effects which result from it. Many animals soon become complete; but the hu

*Both sexes under five were, in 1821, 1,566,268; those from five to nine, 1,376,315; those from nine to fourteen, 1,172,979; out of the whole population of England and Wales at that time, of 10,530,671.

man being is delayed in its development, that we may have the charming ages of children; and what should be a continual source of further admiration is, that in all these changes of form and age the human being is always a perfect figure.

LETTER XXI.

Sketch of the Plan on which the Female World appears to have been arranged, qualified and stationed.-The Effect of it on Human Society.

MY DEAR SON,

Our view of the Divine economy of human life will not be so complete as experience enables us to infer it, unless we consider the state of the female portion of human nature in the general course and order of society. It is so distinct in many points from that of the male division, and is so differently directed, that it deserves a separate examination.

The first great fact which it presents to us is, that daily life shows it to have been designed that the chief and central fountain of family happiness should be everywhere THE MOTHER. From her, the blessing flows to her wedded associate and to her children, to both of whom she is, and has been meant to be, the kindest friend and daily benefactress; ever doing something serviceable to them, desirous and seeking always to benefit them, and in her very presence a constant object of gentle pleasure to them. It was manifestly devised and settled by the Creator, in his formation of female nature, that this should be the effect; and most successfully and universally has his plan been executed.

By the parental system which he has put into continual operation, the mother is always so circumstanced with her offspring that they cannot see her without interest and sympathy, from the constitution of their nature, and from the first portion of their life on earth. Their wants and their gratifications, their good and evil of all sorts, connect them perpetually with her. She is the cause, the maker, the provider, and the distributer of their daily comforts; they perceive, with rapidity,

that she is their refuge and preserver, and apply to her as such. She becomes their daily trust and hope; she is as necessary as she is pleasing to them; without her they would perish soon after their birth. To her care, and maternal supplies, and attentions they are indebted for becoming permanent beings on their newly-visited earth, until other agencies remove them from it. She introduces them to its living society, and trains them to be parts themselves of its rational circles. She is to them the immediate and acting representative of that parental Providence under whose guardianship we are all subsisting. Thus the female world is, at all times, united with the new generations which arise and carry on the stream and progress of human nature by the most influential sympathies and causes that can interest human beings with each other. The mother has the felicity of being to them a perpetual blessing, and, by fostering and rearing them, of being a daily and hourly producer of good, and a giver of happiness. No mother lives in vain; no mother need ever say, "I have lost a day." Emperors and men may, and too often do, pass many useless, and some very mischievous days, weeks, and even years; the mother never, unless she counteracts the very principles of her own being, and becomes wilfully unnatural and unsexual; and what is that but being half maniacal, whenever any are so?

What the mother is in her maternal life, the rest of the female world are likewise, in no small degree, as her allies or substitutes, although they may not be parents; for as soon as the daughters become capable of intentional and imitating activity, they join her in all her kindnesses and duties; they share in all her labours, and assist in promoting the benefits which she originates and is communicating.

The mother and her daughters become thus, in every family, the fountains and makers of its daily conveniences and comforts. They must be most unfortunately fractious and perverse if this be not the habitual consequence of their lives, The effects may not be noticed by those who profit from them as proceeding from these living causes, but they must be always thus issuing, for they have no other source. If, then, the female members of society only keep themselves from being clouded or disturbed by wrong feelings or rude habits, they cannot be inmates of any home without these results naturally and regularly flowing from their daily life, and social position, and constitutional formation. A higher power

than their own has so framed them, and by their frame, as it develops, gradually leads them to these utilities.

If the mother have good sense, good intentions, a due knowledge of what she has to do, and the usual state of temper which, by the make and system of her being, has been provided to accrue to her; if she preserve the suavity, and ease, and gentle manner which have been made, by all these means, to be natural to her sex, she will, unaffectedly and insensibly, diffuse around her emanations of these qualities. She will raise in others the placid feelings which are actuating herself. She will look, and speak, and spread the moral beauties which bud, and bloom, and expand within her imperceptibly to herself. What is assumed never, or but shortly, interests. The charm lies in the natural reality; the artificial wearies or dissatisfies, and cannot be lasting or uniform. When perceived to be the mask, and not the genuine soul or features, the detection always prevents the confidence and regard which true benignity creates. Truth has in all things an abiding attraction, which no counterfeit can retain.

But so admirably is the fabric of human life constructed, and are all its component parts arranged and qualified, that if the wife or mother be the true growth of nature, with that cultivation which her intellectual improvement in civilized societies now occasions, she will be the daily benefactress of her family; all her household will find a general comfort about them, originating from her intentions and superintendence. Neatness, quiet, harmony, order, and prudent selfregulation, both in mind and in manners, will, from her example, be the character of that home, of which she will then be the model, the attraction, and the presiding queen.

This is what, in the plan and purpose of Providence, they have been designed to be, and what every wife and mother may be. It is but just to add, that it is only a description of what the female world of Europe and America most generally are; and what those of Asia and Africa would be also, if their paganism or Mohammedanism were to be exchanged for Christianity. This religion is the true patron, friend, fosterer, and exalter of women of all classes; their best qualities are peculiarly congenial with its Divine precepts, and disclose themselves most efficaciously under its supporting protection.

But it will always rest with themselves to be of this character and conduct, and to have this moral enchantment habit