In pursuance of my plan, it will be necessary for me sometimes to recur more than once to the same topic; but the repetition involved will be more apparent than real. It will be such repetition as the multiplication-table displays, whose first column gives you two times four, its third four times two, its fourth four times five, and so on to the end. You have the same figures, but in different combinations. I shall bring forward the same facts, but they will be presented under different lights, and will bear upon different conclusions.
I shall also, without hesitation, discuss topics on which I have spoken at former times, but without perceiving all their relations. No architect would reject stones which were necessary to the symmetry of his building because he had previously used them for other purposes.
I shall touch upon many and diverse themes; but nothing will be irrelevant. An atmosphere embraces the whole globe, and nothing human is foreign to it.
One person may not succeed in dispelling all the miasms of the earth, but if he can only cleanse one little corner of it, if he can but send through the murky air one cool, bracing, healthy gale, he will do much better than to sit under his vine, scared by the greatness of the evil and the dignity of those who support it.
The laws and customs regarding the education of girls and the employment of women may be wrong and difficult of righting; but a more elemental wrong, and one that lies within reach of every parent, is the coarse, mercenary, and revolting tone of sentiment in which girls are brought up and in which women live, entirely apart from their technical education and employment. I refer now to the refined and educated, as well as, and indeed more than, to the rude and illiterate, for it is their altitude which determines the level of all below. This tone of sentiment is such as to diminish girls' self-respect, mar their purity, and dwarf their being. They inhale, they imbibe, they are steeped in the idea, that the great business of their life is marriage, and if they fail to secure that they will become utterly bankrupt and pitiable. Naturally this idea becomes their ruling motive; all their course is bent to its guidance; and from this idea and this course of action spring crime, and sorrow, and disaster, "in thick array of depth immeasurable."