to the weakest
hunter of the mildest heresies in remote villages, the fetichisms and
superstitions of this world are bolstered up mainly by women.

"In Lessing's great picture, the good, kind-faced woman whose simplicity
Huss blesses as she eagerly heaps up the fagots for his martyrdom, is
but the type of vast multitudes of mothers of the race.

"The greatest aid which could be rendered to smooth the way for any
noble thinkers who are to march through the future, would be to increase
the number of women who, by an education which has caught something from
manly methods, are prevented from clinging to advancing thinkers, or
throwing themselves hysterically across their pathway.

"So, too, that indirect influence of women on political events, so
lauded even by those who are most opposed to any exercise by her of
direct influence, has some bad qualities which a better system of
education might diminish. The simple historical record shows that in
what Bacon calls the 'insanity of states,' her influence has generally
been direful. From Catherine de Medicis in the struggle of the League,
down to Louise Michel, in the recent catastrophe at Paris--from the
_tricoteuses_ of the first French Revolution to the _petroleuses_ of the
last, woman has seemed to aggravate rather than soothe popular fury.
Nor is the history of civil strife nearer home, without parallel
examples.

"An education which would lead women to a more thoughtful consideration
of great questions and more logical treatment of them, would, perhaps,
do something to aid mercy and justice in the world at those very times
when they are most imperiled.

"But to all this it may be said that these considerations are too
general and remote--that woman's most immediate duties relate to
maternity, and that her most beautiful mission relates to the dispensing
of charities. As to her duties as mother, if the subject were fully
discussed, it would be shown that, under the present system of physical,
mental, and moral education of women, there is a toleration of perhaps
the most cancerous evil of modern society. Suffice it that the system of
education proposed cannot make it worse, and may make it better.

"As to woman's beautiful function as the dispenser of charities, it will
do no harm to have leading minds among women shown, as a stronger
education would show them, that systems of charity based on impulse and
not on reason have in older countries caused almost as much m