he
university they could not attain. It is lamented that the number of
really disinterested students attending Girton and Newnham is small; the
same complaint is heard from the Halls for women at Oxford; there is a
certain want of confidence as to the future and what it is all leading
to. To women with a professional career before them the degree
certificates are of value, but the course of studies itself and its
mental effect is conceded by many to be disappointing. One reason may be
that the characteristics of girls' work affect in a way the whole
movement. They are very eager and impetuous students, but in general the
staying power is short; an excessive energy is put out in one direction,
then it flags, and a new beginning is made towards another quarter. So
in this general movement there have been successive stages of activity.

The higher education movement has gone on its own course. The first
pioneers had clear and noble ideals; Bedford College, the growth of
Cheltenham, the beginnings of Newnham and Girton Colleges, the North of
England Ladies' "Council of Education" represented them. Now that the
movement has left the port and gone beyond what they foresaw, it has met
the difficulties of the open sea.

Nursing was another sphere opened about the same time, to meet the
urgent needs felt during the Crimean War; it was admirably planned out
by Florence Nightingale, again a pioneer with loftiest ideals. There
followed a rush for that opening; it has continued, and now the same
complaint is made that it is an outlet for those whose lives are not to
their liking at home, rather than those who are conscious of a special
fitness for it or recognized as having the particular qualities which it
calls for. And then came the development of a new variety among the
unemployed of the wealthier classes, the "athletic girl." Not every one
could aspire to be an athletic girl, it requires some means, and much
time; but it is there, and it is part of the emancipation movement. The
latest in the field are the movements towards organization of effort,
association on the lines of the German _Frauenbund_, and the French
_Mouvement Feministe_, and beside them, around them, with or without
them, the Women's Suffrage Movement, militant or non-militant. These are
of the rising tide, and each tide makes a difference to our coast-line,
in some places the sea gains, in others the land, and so the thinkers,
for and against, register their v