ms of home. I dare say you
remember the young lady who wanted to go and learn nursing in a
hospital, and was asked by the doctor why she desired this. "Father is
paralysed," she said, "and mother is nearly blind, and my sisters are
all married, and it is so dull at home; so I thought I should like
nursing." I don't want you to emulate that young person. Grudge no love
and care at home: no one can give such happiness to parents, brothers,
sisters, as you can, and to make people happy is in itself a worthy
mission; it is the next best thing to making them good. And remember
also, that there are many years before you: and that though it may seem
that years are spent with nothing effected except that somehow things
have gone more smoothly, you yourself will have been matured, deepened,
and consolidated by a life of duty, in a way in which no self-chosen
path of life could have trained you. And if, as is quite possible, some
of you are impatient already for the exercise of your powers in some
great work, I will preach patience to you from another motive. It is
this: that you are not yet capable of doing much that is useful, from
want of training and general ability. I remember Miss Octavia Hill once
saying that she could get any quantity of money, and any quantity of
enthusiasm, but that her difficulty was to get trained intelligence,
either in men or women. So, a few days ago, Miss Clementina Black, who
is Hon. Secretary of the Women's Trade Association, said to a friend of
my own that she had had many voluntary lady helpers of various degrees
of education and culture, and that she had found without exception that
the highly educated students were the most fitted to do the work well;
that they alone were capable of the patience, accuracy, and attention
to detail which were one essential quality to the doing of such work,
and that they alone could provide the other essentials, which can only
spring from a cultivated mind--viz., wideness of view, sense of
proportion, and capacity for general interest in other important
questions--social, literary, and intellectual. "It is this cultivation
of mind which prevents you from being crushed under the difficulty and
tedium and disappointment which must attend every effort to teach
principles and promote ideal aims among the mass of ignorant, apathetic,
uninterested, and helpless working women, who must themselves in the
last resort be the agents in bringing about a better condition of