The being who can think justly in
one track, will soon extend its intellectual empire; and she who has
sufficient judgment to manage her children, will not submit, right
or wrong, to her husband, or patiently to the social laws which make a
nonentity of a wife.
In public schools women, to guard against the errors of ignorance,
should be taught the elements of anatomy and medicine, not only to
enable them to take proper care of their own health, but to make
them rational nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands; for
the bills of mortality are swelled by the blunders of self-willed
old women, who give nostrums of them own without knowing any thing
of the human frame. It is likewise proper only in a domestic view,
to make women acquainted with the anatomy of the mind, by allowing the
sexes to associate together in every pursuit; and by leading them to
observe the progress of the human understanding in the improvement
of the sciences and arts; never forgetting the science of morality, or
the study of the political history of mankind.
A man has been termed a microcosm; and every family might also be
called a state. States, it is true, have mostly been governed by
arts that disgrace the character of man; and the want of a just
constitution, and equal laws, have so perplexed the notions of the
worldly wise, that they more than question the reasonableness of
contending for the rights of humanity. Thus morality, polluted in
the national reservoir, sends off streams of vice to corrupt the
constituent parts of the body politic; but should more noble, or
rather, more just principles regulate the laws, which ought to be
the government of society, and not those who execute them, duty
might become the rule of private conduct.
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