to its base the whole system and even the whole ideal of female education, so that there is scarcely a private school in the country which has not been more or less affected by the change. In a word, whether we like it or not, the woman's movement is upon us; and what we have now to do is to guide the flood into what seem likely to prove the most beneficial channels. What are these channels?

Of all the pricks against which it is hard to kick the hardest are those which are presented by Nature in the form of facts. Therefore we may begin by wholly disregarding those short-sighted enthusiasts who seek to overcome the natural and fundamental distinction of sex. No amount of female education can ever do this, nor is it desirable that it should. On this point I need not repeat what is now so often and so truly said, as to woman being the complement, not the rival, of man. But I should like to make one remark of another kind. The idea underlying the utterances of all these enthusiasts seems to be that the qualities wherein the male mind excels that of the female are, sui generis, the most exalted of human faculties these good ladies fret and fume in a kind of jealousy that the minds, like the bodies, of men are stronger than those of women. Now, is not this a radically mistaken view? Mere strength, as I have already endeavored to insinuate, is not the highest criterion of nobility. Human nature is a very complex thing, and among the many ingredients which go to make the greatness of it even intellectual power is but one, and not by any means the chief. The truest grandeur of that nature is reveal ed by that nature as a whole, and here I think there can be no doubt that the feminine type is fully equal to the masculine, if indeed it be not superior. For I believe that if we all go back in our memories to seek for the highest experience we have severally had in this respect, the character which will stand out as all in all the greatest we have ever known will be the character of a woman. Or, if any of us have not been fortunate in this matter, where in fiction or in real life can we find a more glorious exhibition of all that is best-the mingled strength and beauty, tact, gay

ety, devotion, wit, and consummate ability-where but in a woman can we find anything at once so tender, so noble, so lovable, and so altogether splendid as in the completely natural character of a Portia ? A mere blue-stocking who looks with envy on the intellectual gifts of a Voltaire, while shutting her eyes to the gifts of a sister such as this, is simply unworthy of having such a sister: she is incapable of distinguishing the pearl of great price among the sundry other jewels of our common humanity.

Now, the suspicion, not to say the active hostility, with which the so called woman's movement has been met in many quarters springs from a not unhealthy ground of public opinion. For there can be no real doubt that these things are but an expression of the value which that feeling attaches to all which is held distinctive of feminine character as it stands. Woman, as she has been bequeathed to us by the many and complex influences of the past, is recognized as too precious an inheritance lightly to be tampered with; and the dread lest any change in the conditions which have given us this inheritance should lead, as it were, to desecration, is in itself both wise and worthy. In this feeling we have the true safeguard of womanhood; and we can hope for nothing better than that the deep strong voice of social opinion will always be raised against any innovations of culture which may tend to spoil the sweetest efflorescence of evolution.

But, while we may hope that social opinion may ever continue opposed to the woman's movement in its most extravagant forms - or to those forms which endeavor to set up an unnatural, and therefore an impossible, rivalry with men in the struggles of practical lifewe may also hope that social opinion will soon become unanimous in its encouragement of the higher education of women. Of the distinctively feminine qualities of mind which are admired as such by all, ignorance is certainly not one. Therefore learning, as learning, can never tend to deteriorate those qualities. On the contrary, it can only tend to refine the already refined, to beautify the already beautiful-" when our daughters shall be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace."

It can only tend the better to equip a wife as the helpmeet of her husband, and, by furthering a community of tastes, to weave another bond in the companionship of life. It can only tend the better to prepare a mother for the greatest of her duties-forming the tastes and guiding the minds of her children at a time of life when these are most pliable, and under circumstances of influence such as can never again be reproduced.

It is nearly eighty years ago since this view of the matter was thus presented by Sydney Smith:

If you educate women to attend to dignified and important subjects, you are multiplying beyond measure the chances of human improvement by preparing and medicating those early impressions which always come from the mother, and which, in the majority of instances, are quite decisive of genius. The instruction of women improves the stock of national talents, and employs more minds for the instruction and improvement of the world: it increases the pleasures of society by multiplying the topics upon which the two sexes take a common interest, and makes marriage an intercourse of understanding as well as of affection.

The education of women favors public morals; it provides for every season of life, and leaves a woman when she is stricken by the hand of time, not as she now is, destitute of everything and neglected by all, but with the full power and the splendid attractions of knowledge-diffusing the elegance of polite literature, and receiving the homage of learned and accomplished men.

Since the days when this was written. the experiment of thus educating women to attend to dignified and important subjects has been tried on a scale of rapidly increasing magnitude, and the result has been to show that those apprehensions of public opinion were groundless which supposed that the effect of higher education upon women would be to deteriorate the highest qualities of womanhood. On this point I think it is sufficient to quote the opinion of a lady who has watched the whole course of this experiment, and who is so well qualified to give an opinion that it would be foolish presumption in any one else to dispute what she has to say. The lady to whom I refer is Mrs. Sidgwick, and this is what she says :—

The students that I have known have shown no inclination to adopt masculine sentiments or habits in any unnecessary or unseemly degree; they are disposed to imitate the methods of life and work of industrious undergraduates

just as far as these appear to be means approved by experience to the end which both sets of students have in common, and nothing that I have seen of them, either at the University or afterward, has tended in the smallest degree to support the view that the adaptation of women to domestic life is so artificial and conventional a thing that a few years of free unhampered study and varied companionship at the University has a tendency to impair it.

So far as I am aware, only one other argument has been, or can be, adduced on the opposite side. This argument is that the physique of young women as a class is not sufficiently robust to stand the strain of severe study, and therefore that many are likely to impair their health more or less seriously under the protracted effort and acute excitement which are necessarily incidental to our system of school and university examinations. Now, I may begin by remarking that with this argument I am in the fullest possible sympathy. Indeed, so much is this the case that I have taken the trouble to collect evidence from young girls of my own acquaintance who are now studying at various high schools with a view to subsequently competing for first classes in the Cambridge triposes.

What I have found is that in some of these high schools-carefully observe, only in some absolutely no check is put upon the ambition of young girls to distinguish themselves and to bring credit upon their establishments. The consequence is that in these schools the more promising pupils habitually. undertake an amount of intellectual work which it is sheer madness to attempt. A single quotation from one of my correspondents-whom I have known from a child will be enough to prove this statement.

I never begin work later than six o'clock, and never work less than ten or eleven hours a day. But within a fortnight or so of my examinations I work fifteen or sixteen hours. Most girls, however, stop at fourteen or fifteen hours, but some of them go on to eighteen hours. Of course, according to the school time-tables, none of us should work more than eight hours; but it is quite impossible for any one to get through the work in that time. For instance, in the time-tables ten minutes is put down for botany, whereas it takes the quickest girl an hour and a half to answer the questions set by the school lecturer.

These facts speak for themselves, and therefore I will only add that in many of those high schools for girls which are

situated in large towns no adequate provision is made for bodily exercise, and this, of course, greatly aggravates the danger of over-work. In such a school there is probably no playground; the gymnasium, if there is one, is not attended by any of the harder students; drill is never thought of; and the only walking exercise is to and from the school. Let it not be supposed that I am attacking the high-school system. On the contrary, I believe that this system represents the greatest single reform that has ever been made in the way of education. I am only pointing out certain grave abuses of the system which are to be met with in some of these schools, and against which I should like to see the full force of public opinion directed. There is no public school in the kingdom where a boy of sixteen would be permitted to work from eleven to eighteen hours a day, with no other exercise than a few minutes' walk. Is it not, then, simply monstrous that a girl should be allowed to do so? I must confess that I have met with wonderfully few cases of serious breakdown. All my informants tell me that, even under the operation of so insane an abuse as I have quoted, grave impairment of health but rarely occurs. This, however, only goes to show of what good stuff our English girls are made; and therefore may be taken to furnish about the strongest answer I can give to the argument which I am considering-viz. that the strength of an average English girl is not to be trusted for sustaining any reasonable amount of intellectual work. Upon this point, however, there is at the present time a conflict of medical authority, and as I have no space to give a number of quotations, it must suffice to make a few general remarks.

In the first place, the question is one of fact, and must therefore be answered by the results of the large and numerous experiments which are now in progress; not by any à priori reasoning of a physiological kind. In the next place, even as thus limited, the inquiry must take account of the wisdom or unwisdom with which female education is pursued in the particular cases investigated. As already remarked, I have been myself astonished to find so great an amount of prolonged endurance exhibited by young

girls who are allowed to work at unreasonable pressure; but, all the same, I should of course regard statistics drawn from such cases as manifestly unfair. And seeing that every case of health impaired is another occasion given to the enemies of female education, those who have the interests of such education at heart should before all things see to it that the teaching of girls be conducted with the most scrupulous precautions against over-pressure. Regarded merely as a matter of policy, it is at the present moment of far more importance that girls should not be over-strained than that they should prove themselves equal to young men in the class lists. For my own part, I believe that, with reasonable precautions against over-pressure, and with due provision for bodily exercise, the higher education of women would ipso facto silence the voice of medical opposition. But I am equally persuaded that this can never be the case until it becomes a matter of general recognition among those to whom such education is entrusted, that no girl should ever be allowed to work more than eight hours a day as a maximum; that even this will in a large proportional number of cases be found to prove excessive; that without abundant exercise higher education should never be attempted; and that, as a girl is more liable than a boy to insidiously undermine her constitution, every girl who aspires to any distinction in the way of learning should be warned to be constantly on the watch for the earliest symptoms of impairment. these reasonable precautions were to become as universal in the observance as they now are in the breach, I believe it would soon stand upon the unquestionable evidence of experimental proof, that there is no reason in the nature of things why women should not admit of culture as wide and deep and thorough as our schools and universities are able to provide.

If

The channels, therefore, into which I should like to see the higher education of women directed are not those which run straight athwart the mental differences between men and women which we have been considering. These differences are all complementary to one another, fitly and beautifully joined together in the social organism. If we at

tempt to disregard them, or try artificially to make of woman an unnatural copy of man, we are certain to fail, and to turn out as our result a sorry and disappointed creature who is neither the one thing nor the other. But if, with out expecting women as a class to enter into any professional or otherwise foolish rivalry with men, for which as a class they are neither physically nor mentally fitted, and if, as Mrs. Lynn Linton remarks, we do not make the mistake of confusing mental development with intellectual specialization-if, without doing either of these things, we encourage women in every way to obtain for themselves the intrinsic advantages of learning, it is as certain as anything can well be that posterity will bless us for our pains. For then all may equally enjoy the privilege of a real acquaintance with letters; ladies need no longer be shut out from a solid understanding of music or painting; lecturers on science will no longer be asked at the close of their lectures whether the cerebellum is inside or outside of the skull, how is it that astronomers have been able to find out the names of the stars, or whether one does not think that his diagram of a jelly-fish serves with admirable fidelity to illustrate the movements of the solar systein. These, of course, I quote as extreme cases, and even as displaying the prettiness which belongs to a child-like simplicity. But simplicity of this kind ought to be put away with other childish things; and in whatever measure it is allowed to continue after childhood is over, the human being has failed to grasp the full privileges of human life. Therefore, in my opinion the days are past when any enlightened man ought seriously to suppose that in

now. again reaching forth her hand to eat of the tree of knowledge woman is preparing for the human race a second fall. In the person of her admirable representative, Mrs. Fawcett, she thus pleads: "No one of those who care most for the woman's movement cares one jot to prove or to maintain that men's brains and women's brains are exactly alike or exactly equal. All we ask is that the social and legal status of women should be such as to foster, not to suppress, any gift for art, literature, learning, or goodness with which women may be endowed." Then, I say, give her the apple, and see what comes of it. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the result will be that which is so philosophically as well as so poetically portrayed by the Laureate :—

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink Together, dwarf'd or god-like, bond or free. *

*

*

*

*

Then let her make herself her own

To give or keep, to live and learn to be

*

All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is