p any of the children in-doors let it be the
boys; they will have out-door life afterwards, but let girlhood have its
free play before custom and fashion fetter it forever. So, too, in
manners; how many mothers apologize for their unendurable little
ruffians by saying, "You know boys will be rude!" Why should boys be
rude? Is not _gentleman_ our highest term for all that is honorable and
manly? The physical power that is not under the control of higher
qualities is rude, but rudeness is not evidence of power, only witness
to the want of culture. A sadly pathetic vein runs through Miss
Edgeworth's children's stories, especially _Frank_, in the difference
she makes in the life of man and woman. The children make a list of the
virtues which should be cultivated by men and women, and courage is put
down very low on the woman's side and first on the man's. But there is
no sex in morals, and until courage is deemed essential to woman and
purity to man there can be no moral perfection in either.

Still more is the direct appeal to sexual differences to be avoided in
early childhood. Many foolish parents encourage the custom of having
little beaux and juvenile flirtations, and even very young children are
taught games in which the boy takes out a girl as his partner, and the
reverse. I once saw a dear little girl about four years old put her arm
affectionately around the neck of a little playmate, and her father
said, "Oh, for shame, you shouldn't kiss a boy." Could he have answered
her simple question, "Why not?"

This is one of the important benefits of the co-education of the sexes.
Brought up together in schools as in families, side by side, from early
childhood, there is no false mystery about their relation. Their common
life is developed, and they value each other for individual qualities. I
have never found an exception to the statement by teachers of mixed
schools, that there is less of nonsense, less of false sentimentality
and precocious sexual attraction, than where the boys and girls are kept
separate.

In life as in art those characters are the finest in which the
distinction of sex is recognized but not emphasized--in which the human
nature preponderates over that of man or woman. In the Hercules, the
masculine attributes are exaggerated almost to repulsiveness, but in
the Apollo they are present, but they never intrude themselves upon our
attention. Vigor, freedom, life, and action, the inspiration of genius,