The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

674

CONCERNING HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

bluer than God's heaven, the head was thrown back, the
hair dishevelled, the eyes stared in terror, the face was distorted, and the mouth wide open, as if shrieking in drunken
frenzy.
Let there be sufficient time, and these works of art will
cease to be. The marble god, the ivory satyr, and the
Bacchante will disintegrate into sand and dust. But the
drunken father is also an artist. And he sends out into the
world hideous caricatures of the living God, in the persons
of his own children, who reel through life insane, imbecile,
deformed, and depraved, when they should be men and
women born in the image of the Heavenly Father The
woman who dares marry a libertine, or a drunkard, with
the hope of reforming him, or the expectation of finding
happiness with him, ought to have a chance in a lunatic
asylum, or a home for imbeciles.
Before all forms of government, all types of civilization,
all social institutions, and all advance in education, the
relations of the husband and wife make the everlasting
granite on which the whole world rests. Just so fast and
just so far as these relations are what they ought to be, just
so fast and just so far will society be uplifted, - no faster
and no farther. Monarchies, democracies, and republics
have their benefits and their uplifting tendencies, but it is
the family and the home that lay the foundations of country.
All other influences are fitful and fragmentary The home
influence alone is steady and sufficient, and that depends upon
the relation of the husband and wife -the father and
mother Unless there is on both sides first, respect, and then
love with its all-embracing sympathy, the child's head will
be pillowed upon discord, it will be rocked by restlessness,
and will develop unsymmetrical in character.
One of the great questions of the day is, "How shall we