DAUGHTERLY OBEDIENCE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3165, 20 August 1881, Page 4

DAUGHTERLY OBEDIENCE.

The great difficulty in the lives of hundreds of daughters of the upppr ranks just now li-8 in this : that they find themselves torn between two opposing impulses, and know not which they ought to follow. On one side are the habits of a child, and the assurance of everybody that the same habits of quiescence and submission ought to be maintainpd into womanhood. On the other hand there is the same instinct which we see in a '". hy's limbs, to stir, to change its position, to climb, to run ; to use, in short, the muscles and facilities ifc possesses. Every young bird flutters away from its nest, however soft ; every little rabbit quits the comfortable holf in which it was born ; and we take ifc as fib and right that it should do so, even when there are hawks and weasels all round. Only when a young girl wants to do anything of the analogus kind, her instinct is treated as a sort of sin. She is asked, " Cannot she be contented, having so nice a home and luxuries provided in abundance ?" Keble's fine but muchmisused lines about " room to deny ourselves" and the "common" and "daily round" being all we ought to require are sure to quoted against her ; and, in short, she feels herself a culprit, and probably at least once a week has a fit of penitence for her incorrigible " discontont.'! I have known this kind of thing to go on for years, and ifc is repeated in hundreds, in thousands, of families. I have known ifc where there were seven miserable big young women in one little house ! It is supposed to be the most impossible thing in the world for a parent to give his son a stone for bread or a serpent for a fish. Bub scores of fathers, in the high ranks, give their daughters diamonds when they crave for education, and twist around their necks the serpents of idle luxury and pleasure when they ask for wholesome employment,—Frances Power Cobbe,