Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/61

 employed. As regards charity, women, he conceives, are in the present state of the world both unable to see and unwilling to admit the ultimate evil tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself to their sympathetic feelings. To the contributions and the influence of women is, he conceives, due the continually increasing mass of unenlightened and short-sighted benevolence which, relieving people from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the foundations of self-respect, self-help, and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue. Few, indeed, are the women who can appreciate the value of self-dependence; noxious, therefore, he holds, is often the influence of a wife upon her husband: it tends to prevent him from falling below the common standard of ordinary respectability, it tends as strongly to prevent him from rising above it. 'Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs. Grundy.' The approbation of that potentate may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is of great importance to his wife. Her