A Treatise on Domestic Economy; For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School

consequence of these, and other evils, which will be pointed out more at large in the following pages, the young women of America grow up with such a delicacy of constitution, that probably eight out of ten become subjects of disease, either before or as soon as they are called to the responsibilities of domestic life. But there is one peculiarity of situation, in regard to American women, which makes this delicacy of constitution still more disastrous. It is the liability to the exposures and hardships of a newly-settled country. One more extract from De Tocqueville will give a view of this part of the subject, which any one, familiar with Western life, will admire for its verisimilitude. "The same strength of purpose which the young wives of America display in bending themselves, at once, and without repining, to the austere duties of their new condition, is no less manifest in all the great trials of their lives. In no country in the world, are private fortunes more precarious, than in the United States. It is not uncommon for the same man, in the course of his life, to rise and sink again through all the grades which lead from opulence to poverty. American women support these vicissitudes with a calm and unquenchable energy. It would seem that their desires contract, as easily as they expand, with their fortunes. The greater part of the adventurers, who migrate, every year, to people the Western wilds, belong" "to the old Anglo-American race of the Northern States. Many of these men, who rush so boldly onward in pursuit of wealth, were already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the Country. They take their wives along with them, and make them share the countless perils and privations, which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who, after having been brought up amid all the comforts of the large towns of New England, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of their