shed plan. With the pecuniary aid of friends in America, she
has founded a school for the preparation of young women who have
finished the courses heretofore open to them, and who wish to become
teachers of English in the Government schools. The examinations for such
positions have always been open to women, but, because of the difficulty
in securing proper preparation, there are few who pass them. Since its
opening in September, 1900, the school has been crowded with promising
pupils, and the small accommodations with which it began, although
already once enlarged, are stretched to the uttermost. The girls come
from the government high schools and from the mission schools, and the
course offered to them of three years of study in English literature,
composition, translation, and methods of teaching has proved a strong
attraction. In recognition, perhaps, of this effort on behalf of her
countrywomen, certainly, of her position at the head of her profession,
this same woman has this year been appointed on the examining committee
for the government English examinations, an honor never before given to
one of her sex,--in itself a sign of the change in thought that the last
few years have wrought.

There can be no doubt that the education of women is moving forward,
pushed by the leading men of the country and aided by the earnest work
of the women themselves. It is still far behind the education offered to
men, and the ideal of most of its promoters is limited to the purely
utilitarian; but as long as it moves forward and not backward, and as
long as the years of work show an increased number of women fitted to
meet the changing conditions of the time, we do well to approve rather
than criticise, remembering that the problem is an exceedingly intricate
one, and one of which even the best-instructed foreigner can see only a
small part of the difficulty.

The year 1901 sees the printing-press almost as much of a power in
Japan as in the Western world, and it is interesting to notice that
among the innumerable newspapers and magazines now published in the
country there are some twenty or more devoted exclusively to the
interests of women. To be sure, these women's magazines do not undertake
to furnish the loftiest intellectual pabulum, the best of them covering,
perhaps, the same range of subjects that is included in "Woman's
Journals" in the United States. They devote themselves largely to
lectures on morals and manners, an