This leads me to speak of the moral causes which affect the health of woman. A state of high intellectual culture and social refinement, is unfavorable to physical health; at least as education is at present conducted. Besides the years of youth that must be consumed in study, which too often amounts to a species of imprisonment, refinement is only another name for the cultivation of the sensibilities. Those cultivated sensibilities, while they render us capable of a higher order and a greater variety of enjoyment, likewise expose us proportionably to more multiplied and intenser sufferings. It is impossible to cultivate the taste without rendering us more liable to annoyance. The rude collisions of society, create a greater disturbance of feeling, as the sense of propriety becomes more distinct and imperative. Woman is very dependent for her daily comfort on the consideration and forbearance of those with whom her lot is cast. Her natural sensibility renders her liable to many grievances which make no lasting impression upon the rougher sex. It has been said, that her life is a series of suppressed emotions. How few women there are who are situated precisely to their minds, and how little power

has any woman to change or obviate the causes of her annoyance! Emotion too often becomes a pent up fire, the more consuming from the impossibility of revealing the causes of distress. Bereavement, loss of fortune, unkindness of connexions, are liable at any moment to inflict an incurable wound upon the peace of the possessor of the most affluent and happy lot.

Of all human beings, a woman has the most need of robust health, and that firmness of nerves which is usually its consequence, to meet and overcome the troubles which she may be called on at any moment to encounter. If there is not this constitutional strength, built up and preserved by systematic discipline, almost any misfortune may involve another, scarcely less than the greatest, the loss of health. Where moral causes are at work, which are out of the reach of the physician to remedy, or perhaps to detect, it is in vain that medical aid is called in. The physician that is needed is one which can

"Minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain."

Much of the pity which is expressed by what are called the higher classes, for the sorrows of the lower, is thrown away. They suffer quite as great troubles themselves, which their morbid sensibilities, and enfeebled constitutions, make them less able to bear. Perpetual toil never suffers the nerves of the laborious to become unstrung.

As soon as

they lay their heads on their pillows, overpowering weariness steeps them in sweet oblivion of their woes, while the sorrowstricken daughter of luxury and abundance watches till the morning star, or tosses on a fiery sea of troubles. Thus it is, that gaiety and grief, are alike the enemies of woman's health.

But we will suppose the young woman to

have escaped with her life from the dangers to which she has been exposed by the confinement of school and the follies of what is called society; the next sphere she enters is that of the wife and mother. Here the necessity of firm health is felt with tenfold force. While a woman is a single member of a family, the daughter or the sister, the social discomfort of ill health, or even the sorrow of premature death, is less extensively

felt. There is the unhappiness of perpetual anxiety, a constant drawback upon that cheerfulness and hilarity which ought to animate every fireside; there is watching and nursing, and a heavy draught continually made upon the affections and the sympathies. The order and organization of the family is disturbed, but not broken up.

But the position of the wife and mother is wholly different. If she is disabled, every thing goes wrong. Health and energy, and the power of unwearied supervision, are to her indispensable. Her happiness, the prosperity of her husband and family, depend upon it. With most young people, the possibility of entering upon the married state at all, of gratifying those strong affections which draw the sexes together, of consummating those long cherished attachments which spring up between congenial minds, depends upon their ability to live on small means. And one of the saddest consequences which is seen to follow every advance of luxury and extravagance, is the increasing number of the excellent and cultivated of both sexes, whom the arbitrary and tyrannous standard, which senseless custom sets up of what constitutes

a necessary outfit in life, and the expected scale of expenditure afterward, have condemned to a single life. This arbitrary despotism alone, in the length and breadth of its operation, almost equalizes all conditions, and counterbalances the advantages possessed by what are called the higher classes of society. In the humbler ranks, the affections are set free, no stern mandate of pride or ambition comes in to chill or freeze their current, or sever and disappoint them for ever. There is no waiting till the bloom of life is passed, and the sensibilities are deadened by unreasonable delays. There is no consuming war between taste and condition, none of that moral cowardice, which would sacrifice every thing that is most precious in life, to the fantastic fear of losing caste.

The demands which are made on the energy, the industry, the vigilance and the endurance of the wife and mother, are incessant and increasing. I mean the woman of conscience and principle. There are wives and mothers, I allow, who are troubled by none of these things, who seek their own ease and pleasure at any sacrifice; who give their children up, as soon as they are born,