ght and life; and go through
it all and graduate with diploma in hand at fourteen or sixteen years of
age. Here again women are cheated with a bauble. Little girls are told
that they are educated at this tender age, and to prove it are referred
to their diplomas, announcing to the world that they have been through a
regular course of study at such an institution. Only think of it--a
finished education at sixteen! Why, the majority of our young men can
not get ready for college till they are twenty or twenty-five. There
they spend four years in hard study and the most vigorous mental
discipline, delving in the deep mines of science and untombing the rich
archives of history and human thought; then study three years the
masters of their professions. And even then they are but boys in thought
and action, and must meet the hard discipline of active life before we
award to them intellectual manhood. We compare these educated girls with
these educated young men, and wonder at the weakness of the female mind!
The girls went to school because it was fashionable; the boys at the
call of an honorable ambition. The girls studied to appear well in
society; the boys to tread life's highway with honor and win laurels
from the hand of the world in the duties of useful professions. The
girls were stimulated by nothing that was great and noble in action; the
boys were fired by all that can stir up human ambition. True, the innate
glory of cultivated minds was before them both, but that alone in our
present sensuous life has seldom been found a sufficient stimulus to
vigorous intellectual discipline. I should be glad to see a class of our
strongest young women go through Dartmouth, Yale, and Cambridge colleges
with the same preparation and stimulants that our young men possess. If
I mistake not, they would graduate with honors, and be heard from in the
high field of intellectual life.

But as this can not be at present, our young women must make the best of
the opportunities they have. What education they do get should be
thorough, practical, and from proper motives. They must fill woman's
place, and they ought to prepare for it as thoroughly as possible. They
have an intellectual life to live and intellectual duties to perform.
How poorly they will live that life and perform those duties without a
preparation. Many young women can not attend school and enjoy the common
routine of mental discipline; but they may read and study at home; th