Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/244

Rh their written compositions, in verse and prose, show an unusual purity of style, considering their age, clearness of thought, and expansion of mental horizon. It is evident that the spirit of the New World has unbound their intellectual wings and permitted them a free flight over the fields of earth. The American woman is being formed for a citizen of the world; she is teaching herself to embrace the whole of humanity. Such is evidently the intention of her school education, even if an adequate system be yet wanting. Girls may from these schools also advance into the high schools and ladies' academies, in which they can graduate and take diplomas, and, provided with these, go out as teachers over the whole Union.

Such are, in particular, the daughters of New England, who seem to have a peculiar vocation for the office of teacher, which they adopt most frequently from love, rather than necessity. Everywhere throughout the United States, in the west as well as in the north and south of the Union, wherever schools are in operation, you meet with young teachers from the States of New England, that is to say, from those States which are peopled by the descendants of the Pilgrim fathers. And the value of women as teachers of the young increases more and more in America.

But it is not merely as teachers that the spirit of the New World seeks to prepare for woman a freer development of her being, and a wider sphere of activity; it seeks to open for her free paths in arts and manufactures.

“If I must choose between giving education to the men or the women of a country, I would leave the men and begin with the women,” said one of the legislators of this country to me one day.

And I believe that I do not say too much, when I maintain that this mode of thinking is participated by the greater number of men in the United States; so strong is the conviction of the power of woman's influence on the rising generation.