The reason is, that an
educated mind knows how to use and save its body, to work it and spare
it, as an uneducated mind cannot; and so the college-bred youth brings
himself safely through fatigues which kill the unreflective laborer.
Cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of
their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head
save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and
arrangement, they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less
expense of time and strength than others. The old New-England motto,
_Get your work done up in the forenoon_, applied to an amount of work
which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to sunset.
A lady living in one of our obscure New-England towns, where there were
no servants to be hired, at last by sending to a distant city succeeded
in procuring a raw Irish maid-of-all-work, a creature of immense bone
and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one fortnight she
established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the kitchen and
through the house, that her mistress, a delicate woman, incumbered with
the care of young children, began seriously to think that she made more
work each day than she performed, and dismissed her.
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