out; the second will delay it as long as they are
allowed, to give themselves in quiet to the studies and thought which
grow in value to them month by month; the third, energetic and decided,
buckle on their armour and enter themselves at universities for degrees
or certificates according to the facilities offered.

There can be no doubt that important changes were necessary in the
education of women. About the middle of the last century it had reached
a condition of stagnation from the passing away of the old system of
instruction before anything was ready to take its place. With very few
exceptions, and those depended entirely on the families from which they
carae, girls were scarcely educated at all. The old system had given
them few things but these were of value; manners, languages, a little
music and domestic training would include it all, with perhaps a few
notions of "the use of the globes" and arithmetic. But when it dwindled
into a book called "Hangnail's Questions," and manners declined into
primness, and domestic training lost its vigour, then artificiality laid
hold of it and lethargy followed, and there was no more education for
"young ladies."

In a characteristically English way it was individual effort which came
to change the face of things, and honour is due to the pioneers who went
first, facing opposition and believing in the possibilities of better
things. In some other countries the State would have taken the
initiative and has done so, but we have our own ways of working out
things, "l'aveugle et tatonnante infaillibilite de l'Angleterre," as
some one has called it, in which the individual goes first, and makes
trial of the land, and often experiences failure in the first attempts.
From the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the "Vindication
of the Rights of Women" was published by Mary Wollstonecraft, the
question has been more or less in agitation. But in 1848, with the
opening of Queen's College in London, it took its first decided step
forward in the direction of provision for the higher education of women,
and in literature it was much in the air. Tennyson's "Princess" came in
1847, and "Aurora Leigh" from Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1851, and
things moved onward with increasing rapidity until at one moment it
seemed like a rush to new goldfields. One university after another has
granted degrees to women or degree certificates in place of the degrees
which were refused; women a