objects. The progress which is to be expected in the physical sciences and arts, combined with the greater security of property, and greater freedom in disposing of it, which are obvious features in the civilization of modern nations, with the more extensive and more skilful employment of the joint-stock principle, affords space and scope for an indefinite increase of capital and production, and for the increase of population which is its ordinary accompaniment. That the growth of population will overpass the increase of production, there is not much reason to apprehend; and that it should even keep pace with it, is inconsistent with the supposition of any real improvement in the poorest classes of the people. It is, however, quite possible that there might be a great progress in industrial improvement, in the signs of what is commonly called national prosperity; a great increase of aggregate wealth, and even, in some respects, a better distribution of it; that not only the rich might grow richer, but many of the poor might grow rich, that the intermediate classes might become more numerous and powerful, the means of enjoyable existence be more and more largely diffused, while yet the great class at the base of the whole might increase in numbers only, and not in comfort nor in cultivation. We must, therefore, in considering the effects of the progress of industry, admit as a supposition, however greatly we deprecate as a fact, an increase of population as long-continued, as indefinite, and possibly even as rapid, as the increase of production and accumulation. With these preliminary observations on the causes of change at work in a society which is in a state of economical progress, I proceed to a more detailed examination of the changes themselves."

66

We have given the extract entire, as it ends the chapter on the Progressive State of Wealth." It will be seen how Mr. Mill alludes to the formation of joint-stock companies, and partnership of various kinds, as becoming possible whenever people become morally capable of working together. The small means and more delicate physical powers of women may thus be utilized, when each by herself would have failed.

The last passage which we will give to our readers appears to us to be open to some exception. The immense employment of unmarried women in factories, who do possess "as absolute control as men have, over their own persons and their own patrimony or acquisitions," calls for a certain limitation and regulation of their labor on other grounds than that of their possible coercion by men. All dangerous trades, and those which are peculiarly unhealthy, seem to require supervision in a civilized community, and for this reason the factory labor of women, and all occupations in which their physical powers are liable to be overtasked by the very nature of the work, such as underground labor in mines, &c., appears to us fairly to claim legislative consideration. But no question in social morals is more vexed than that of the degree of interference which governments can reasonably exercise in such matters.

Among those members of the community whose freedom of contract ought to be controlled by the Legislature for their own protection, on account (it is said) of their dependent position, it is frequently proposed to include women: and in the recent Factory Act, their labor, in common with that of young persons, has been placed under peculiar restrictions. But the classing together, for this and other purposes, of women and children, appears to me both indefensible in principle and mischievous in practice. Children below a certain age cannot judge or act for themselves; up to a considerably greater age they are inevitably more or less disqualified for doing so; but women are as capable as men of appreciating and managing their own concerns, and the only hindrance to their doing so, arises from the injustice of their present social position. So long as the law makes everything which the wife acquires, the property of the husband, while by compelling her to live with him it forces her to submit to almost any amount of moral and even physical tyranny which he may choose to inflict, there is some ground for regarding every act done by her as done under coercion; but it is the great error of reformers and philanthropists in our time, to nibble at the consequences of unjust power instead of redressing the injustice itself. If women had as absolute a control as men have, over their own persons and their own patrimony or acquisitions, there would be no plea for limiting their hours of laboring for themselves, in order that they might have time to labor for the husband in what is called, by the advocates of restriction, his home. Women employed in factories are the only women in the laboring rank of life whose position is not that of slaves and drudges; precisely because they cannot easily be compelled to work and earn wages in factories against their will. For improving the condition of women, it should, on the contrary, be an object to give them the readiest access to independent industrial employment, instead of closing, either entirely or partially, that which is already open to them."

(To be continued.)

II.-MADAME DE GIRARDIN.

THE lives of certain persons seem to have grown out so naturally from the social sphere in which they were passed, and to have belonged to it so completely, that we cannot even imagine their having occurred elsewhere. Such lives may almost be considered, in their own way, as "representative;" so truly do they reflect the peculiarities of their place and time; and in this category is to be included the life which forms the subject of the present sketch.

Mademoiselle Delphine Gay, better known by her married name,

as Madame de Girardin, was born on the twenty-sixth of January, 1804, in the picturesque old town of Aix-la-Chapelle, the favorite residence and burial-place of Charlemagne, on whose tomb she is said to have been baptized, the Marquise de Custine standing as her godmother. Her parents were at that time in easy circumstances, and occupied a respectable position in the then French Department of the Rhur, of which Aix-la-Chapelle was the chef-lieu, and in which her father held the post of Receiver-General, the emoluments of which were very considerable.

The family of M. Gay consisted of his wife, Madame Sophie Gay -daughter of the beautiful Francesca Peretti, and herself a remarkably beautiful woman,- -one son, and four daughters. The son entered the army, and died in Algeria, of a wound received at the siege of Constantine; of the daughters, one married Count O'Donnell, nephew of the present First Minister of Spain; another married M. de Canclos; the third married M. Garre; the fourth, Delphine, married the well-known political writer, M. Emile de Girardin.

Madame Sophie Gay was not only renowned for her beauty; she was exceedingly clever, witty, showy, and ambitious; was much addicted to literature, and mingled freely in the best literary society of the day. An ardent admirer of Madame de Stäel, whose wellknown romance, 66 Delphine," had called forth the virulent hostility of Parisian critics, Madame Gay had taken up the pen to defend the work and its authoress, so violently decried; and it was the approbation which had followed this, her first, literary effort, that induced her to cultivate a talent which she had previously allowed to lie dormant, but which she henceforth exercised, with equal success, on other subjects. It was in remembrance of this incident, and also in compliment to the distinguished authoress whose first essay in the domain of imaginative creation she had generously defended, that Madame Gay bestowed the name of Delphine on her youngest daughter.

Unfortunately for her family, Madame Gay could never resist the temptation to say a sharp thing; and in this way she often alienated her best and most useful friends. At a certain unlucky evening party, the brilliant wife of the Receiver-General indulged her satirical humor very freely at the expense of the Prefect of the Rhur and his lady. Her imprudent witticisms were at once reported to the Prefect; the Prefect, furious at this impertinence, lost no time in transmitting to the Minister of the Interior an indignant protest against the wife of his subordinate; and the Receiver-General was immediately deprived of his post by the Minister.

Monsieur and Madame Gay now removed with their children to Paris, where the latter exerted all her ingenuity, but in vain, to mollify the ministerial displeasure excited by the unruliness of her tongue, and to obtain another appointment for her husband. Soon after his return to Paris, Monsieur Gay died; and his widow, being

left without pecuniary resources, employed her pen, actively and successfully, in the support of her family.

An intimate friend of the Princess de Chimay, and detesting Napoleon-both on account of the disgrace which she herself had been the means of bringing upon her late husband, and of the persistent refusal of the Emperor to allow her to be presented at his court the handsome widow "threw herself into the ranks of the opposition," and took an active part in the political intrigues of her friend. On the overthrow of Napoleon I. in 1815, she is said to have been one of a group of Parisian ladies who went out to meet and felicitate the Duke of Wellington on his approach to Paris, and who, having presented him with bouquets of violets in token of welcome, were received by the conqueror with the stern rebuke, "Ladies, if a French army should ever enter London, all the women of England would put on mourning."

Under the Restoration, Madame Gay's productions enjoyed a high reputation, and her salon was the rendezvous of themost distinguished artists, writers, and politicians of the day. Chateaubriand, Béranger, Duval, Baour-Loriman, Claude and Horace Vernet, Gérard, Gros, Talma, Fleury, Mdlle. Duchénois, and a host of others-less widely known, but playing a conspicuous part in the Paris of that day— were among the most assiduous visitors of the handsome and popular authoress.

Madame Gay was excessively fond of cards; and card-playing, dancing, and conversation were carried on in her drawing-rooms with equal vivacity; these soirées usually terminating with the reading of verses, the composition of one or other of her guests.

Though Madame Gay lived a life which was, in certain of its details, decidedly more brilliant than edifying, she seems, from her daughter's earliest years, to have divined the exceptional organization of which that daughter was destined to furnish such ample proof in after life, and to have given her the most careful education it was in her power to command; while the interest and expectations of her friends were excited to a high degree by the indications of a childhood equally rich in the promise of talent and of beauty; Delphine's earliest literary attempts being made in the shape of poetical effusions of her own composition, which she recited at her mother's soirées, amidst the enthusiastic applause of the friendly critics there assembled.

By the time the clever child had fairly entered her teens, she was, indeed, as remarkable for her personal grace and loveliness as for her real, though somewhat precocious talent. The threadbare simile of "lilies and roses" might have been invented for her, so pure was her complexion, and so fresh the delicate coloring of her cheeks. Large blue eyes, clear, soft, and kindly; a broad, high forehead, smooth as marble; a lovely little mouth disclosing the pearliest teeth, and gifted with the gayest and most winning smiles; and a profusion of magnificent golden hair falling in rich curls over

her snowy shoulders;-such were the items of an ensemble that threw poets and painters into raptures, and attracted the admiration of all who saw her.

The fame of her talent and beauty, spread abroad by admiring friends, was not long in introducing their possessor to a wider sphere; and the young poetess, received with open arms by the Duchess de Duras and Madame Récamier, soon became the idol of their respective salons, the last refuge of the brilliant traditions of a phase of social intercourse now numbered among the things of the past. Béranger, who likened her shoulders to those of Venus -Chateaubriand, who declared her smile to be that of an angel— Byron, from whom the charms of her wit and beauty won praises of her verses which the misanthropic bard refused to those of Chateaubriand-and Gérard, who rendered to her the flattering homage of his pencil-were but the leaders of the chorus of praise and adulation that proclaimed their young favorite to be one of the three most beautiful women of the Paris of that day, the Duchess de Guiche (now Duchess de Gramont) and Comtesse d'Agoult (more widely known by her pseudonym of Daniel Stern) being the two other "bright, particular stars" of that mundane heaven.

At the age of eighteen, Delphine presented to the Academy a poem in praise of the self-devotion displayed at Barcelona by the French physicians and the sisters of the order of St. Camilla during the plague which ravaged that city. The Academy had offered a prize for the best composition on this subject; but Delphine, in submitting her poem to the judgment of that learned body, had accompanied its presentation with a distinct intimation that its author declined to compete for this prize. The poem received the unanimous plaudits of the judges, and an "honorable mention," couched in the most flattering terms, was awarded to its author, and inscribed in the annals of the Academy. A number of other poems followed this first appearance of the young poetess in public; and of these the "Verses on the Death of General Foy" was the most admired, and raised their author at once to the very pinnacle of public favor. It is necessary, indeed, in this latter half of the century, to recall the circumstances under which these verses were produced, in order to understand the whirlwind of enthusiasm they created, and by which they were caught up and carried over the length and breadth of the land. Read at the grave of the illustrious soldier, as his coffin was lowered into its last resting-place in the cemetery of Père La Chaise, these verses were printed immediately after the funeral, and commanded a sale which realized four thousand francs; while the young poetess, to whom her admirers had previously given the appellation of the "Tenth Muse," was now lauded to the skies as "La Muse de la Patrie." The verses which had met with such universal acceptance were engraved on the monument subsequently erected to the memory of General Foy; and the sculptor, David, introduced a portrait of their young author into the group