avage torture, and the
parents, who take so little notice of what is going on, that they permit
their daughters to continue such work. It is not the legitimate
brain-work, but the nervous excitement, that breaks and kills. It is not
work but worry that tires.

However, any words which lead to earnest discussion on the educational
question are welcomed by all true educators, for Truth, which is the end
and aim of their search, will never suffer in the conflict.

But, were the "old times" so much better than the present? In making the
statement that they were, we are always apt to be misled by omitting two
considerations of no light weight. The first is, that we draw our
information and statistics now from a vastly wider area than in the
"good old times," and hence that our figures relating to crime and
disease always appear disproportionately large. The railroad, the
steamboat, the telegraph, the printing-press--effects and causes of
advancing civilization--have practically enlarged our mental horizon,
and death, disease, and crime appear in unnaturally large proportions.
And yet, if it be true that among the first Anglo-Saxon generation born
and reared on this side the Atlantic, it was common for the men to have
often, two, three, and four wives, it seems that the causes of disease
and death among the women were not inactive even then.

The second consideration referred to is this: As medical instruments
multiply, diseases appear to multiply in exact proportion. With
the advent of the ophthalmoscope, for instance, how innumerable
and complicated appear the diseases of the eye. Are we justified
in concluding, then, that in the "good old times" of our
great-grandmothers--that idyllic time when women must have been at least
free from the reproach that they, solely and unaided, were destroying
the hopes of the race--that myopic, hypermetropic and astigmatic eyes
were not in existence? Such a conclusion would be manifestly unfair. It
seems impossible, in this view, to make any fair comparison of the
health of women in the present, and in the past; that is, any comparison
which will be sufficiently accurate for scientific purposes.

It were better, if we must have an idyllic realm somewhere, to posit it
rather in the future than in the past, and to work with all the light we
are able to secure towards its attainment. This working may, however, be
done in two ways as regards education: we may state, first, and I think
with