g up from the laity of men and women who should stand for
the spiritual rights of the lower orders of society especially,--there
was a notable band of Christian philanthropic women who brightened the
close of the century.

By harnessing human compassion to social needs, the distressed classes
of society came to be lifted to that position of betterment which is
theirs to-day, largely through agencies that owe their beginnings to
the More sisters, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau. It is always a
pleasing task to turn to such women as these, exemplifying as they do
the attainments of the sex in those peculiar and special ways which so
well represent the adaptations of women. The greatest woman who graced
the annals of helpfulness of the last half of the eighteenth century
in England was Hannah More. The beautiful devotion of her long and
honorable life to the cause of teaching, and the widespread interest
which, by her writings, she attracted to the subject both in Europe
and America, place her at the source of one of the mighty streams of
pervasive influence that have ever permeated human society. So great
was her appreciation of the character and the position of woman, that
she was able to forecast well-nigh everything that has been enunciated
in modern times with regard to the place of the sex in education and
in society.

Hannah More was born in 1745, in a little village near Bristol. Her
father, who was the village schoolmaster, gave his five daughters
educations adapted as near as might be to the peculiar talents of
each. Three of the girls opened a boarding school in Bristol, when
the oldest was only twenty years of age. This school soon became
fashionable and ultimately famous. It was to this institution that
the early labors of Hannah More were given, and it was here that she
attracted the attention of such men as Ferguson the astronomer, the
elder Sheridan, Garrick the tragedian, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Burke, and
indeed nearly all men of eminence in intellectual and state life. But
her associations were not solely with the fashionable world, by which
she was petted and flattered, for she turned her attention to labors
for the poor and the ignorant. She sought to do for the children who
lived amid the savage profligacy of the peasant class what Madame
de Maintenon sought to do for girls of the aristocratic class in her
country. Both alike aimed to offset the perversion of character which
threatened the girls o