ant within them, "lasting" rather than
"living,"--are they really happy? Is not Robert Louis Stevenson right
when he says that "the ideal of the stalled ox is the one ideal that
will never satisfy either man or woman"? Were not the hardships of a
smaller income and a larger life--a life that would at least satisfy a
woman's worst foe, heart hunger,--more adapted to their true nature,
their true happiness?

And to what further admirable results have we attained by this high
standard of comfort and luxury? Nature has carefully provided for the
equality of the sexes by sending rather more boys than girls into the
world, since fewer boys are reared; but we have managed to derange this
order. We have sent our boys out into the world, but we have kept our
girls at home, refusing to allow them to rough it with husbands and
brothers or to endure the least hardness. The consequence is that we
have nearly a million of surplus women in the old country, while in
America, and in our own colonies, we have a corresponding surplus of
men, with all the evil moral consequences that belong to a disproportion
between the sexes. Truly we may congratulate ourselves!

I would therefore urge that if we are really to grapple with these moral
evils, we should simplify our standard of living, and educate our girls
very differently to what, at least in England, we are doing. Culture is
good, and the more we have of it the better; it gives a woman a wider
sphere of influence, as well as more enlightened methods of using that
influence. But if dead languages are to take the place of living
service; if high mathematics are to work out a low plane of cooking and
household management; if a first class in moral science is to involve
third class performance of the moral duties involved in family life,
then I deliberately say it were better that, like Tennyson's mother, we
should be

"Not learned save in gracious household ways."

I protest with the uttermost earnestness against the care of human life,
of human health, and of human comfort being considered a lower thing and
of less importance than good scholarship; or that, when we recognize
that months and even years will have to be devoted to the attainment of
the one, the arts by which we can fulfil those great human trusts which
devolve more or less upon every woman can be practised without ever
having been learnt at all.

Do not misunderstand me. Do not think I am decrying a classical
educa