Instead of that, the first lesson should be, how,
under God, they may take care of themselves. The simple fact is that
a majority of them do have to take care of themselves, and that, too,
after having, through the false notions of their parents, wasted the
years in which they ought to have learned how successfully to maintain
themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and
outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into
womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood.
Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of,
but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of
which I could make a livelihood."
You say you have a fortune to leave them. O man and woman! have you
not learned that, like vultures, like hawks, like eagles, riches
have wings and fly away? Though you should be successful in leaving
a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in
a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an
oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the
church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in
Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the sunken money
cannot be pumped up again, prove to them that it was eternally decreed
that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the
most orthodox and heavenly style.
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