Let us not rest-no, not an instant-till we have won for women the right and the means to the highest culture of which their nature is capable; not that they may gratify an unwomanly spirit of selfish ambition and rivalry, but that they may become more worthy and more fit to do the noble work God has given them to do."

Studying for the Harvard examinations, whether regarded as a course of training for self-support, or as a means of higher cultivation of the mind, will bring its gain in the supplanting of showy superficialities by that solid knowledge which has been lacking in the education of women, and which is so sadly needed, not only to prepare girls to be good wives and mothers, but to fit those who do not sustain these relations to fill honorable careers making of them women—

"Who say not to their Lord, as if afraid,
Here is thy talent in a napkin laid,

But labor in their sphere as those who live
In the delight that work alone can give."

Until our girls are better fitted, by training and education, to take care of themselves, by all means let them continue to have that restraining presence of chaperons which they always have had in our really best society.

CHAPTER XIV.

MISCALLED EDUCATION-WANT OF INDIVIDUALITY-ORIGINAL PEOPLE-AIMLESS STUDY- OBJECTS OF WOMAN'S HIGHER CULTURE.

That noble Englishwoman, Emily Shirreff, daughter of Admiral Shirreff, who has given all the best years of her life to reforms in the education of women, defines "higher education" in this admirable manner: "It is simply the education that follows that of school; the course of study pursued after the preparatory studies of schooltime are completed. Higher education would, in its full meaning, com.prise these as part of the means of that self-culture which begins when childish trammels are cast off, to end only when the uses of this world have trained the immortal spirit for higher work in some yet unknown region."

"Sensible of the supreme importance of right education toward the happiness of a state, our ancestors bestowed the strictest attention upon forming the manners of the youth. . . . Nor did they think it sufficient to lay a foundation of good principles in the minds of young people, and leave them, after they were grown up, to act as they pleased; on the contrary, the manners of adult persons were more strictly inspected than those of youth. . . . The general prevalence of these dispositions in a people is brought about by education and example. . . . Those whose minds have received from education a proper bent, will behave well, though left to themselves. . . . To advise that we should return to some of the institutions of our ancestors is surely a very different matter from proposing innovations.

Experience may teach us what we have to expect, if we go on in the track we are now in."-Isocrates' Areopagic Oration.

'Nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of behavior; many men would willingly endure its vices, who cannot support its manners. Though the manners of European aristocracy do not constitute virtue, they sometimes embellish even virtue itself.

"If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of the Americans ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply, to the superiority of their women."-Democracy in America.

MORE than two thousand years ago, Isocrates, a distinguished writer of Athens, gave utterance to his views concerning the chief requisite toward contributing to the happiness of a people or a state; from which discourse the compiler has culled what he then said of the importance of bestowing the strictest attention upon forming the manners of youth in order to gain this end. Word for word, what he then uttered is applicable to the present condition of our society. The history of social life is always repeating itself, as is the history of nations, and those people are the wisest who take the lessons to heart. To a second Isocrates, a disciple of the Athenian orator, is attributed another discourse, which consists of moral precepts for the conduct of life and the regulation of the deportment of the young, illustrating the fact that, link by link, through long centuries, has the culture of one generation been carried down and connected with the next, for the ultimate advancement of mankind. The individual may perish, the race become extinct, but the effect of culture throws reflected light down the channel of time.

All systems may be said to have descended from previous ones. The ideas of one generation are the mysterious progenitors of those of the next. Each age is the dawn of its successor, and in the eternal advance of truth,

"There always is a rising sun,

And day is ever but begun."

It is thus true that there is nothing new under the sun, since the new grows from the old as boughs grow from the tree; and though errors and exaggerations are, from time

to time, shaken off, yet "the things which cannot be shaken" will certainly abide.

Carlyle says: "Literature is but a branch of religion, and always participates in its character." It is still more true that education is a branch of mental philosophy, and takes its mould and fashion from it. For it is evident that as philosophy, in successive ages, gives varying answers as to man's chief end and summum bonum, so education, which is simply an attempt to prepare him therefor, must vary accordingly. Humboldt hints that the vegetation of whole regions bespeaks and depends on the stratà beneath; and it is certainly true that we cannot delve long in the teacher's plot without coming upon those moral questions which go down to the centre.

Richter delighted to preach the doctrine of an ideal man, and that education is the harmonious development of the faculties and dispositions of each individual. No one knew better than he that (in Carlyle's words) a loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge. This it is that opens the whole mind, and quickens every faculty of the intellect to do its fit work. This it is which influences and controls the manners, and, with proper training, distinguishes the well-educated from the ill-educated, the mannerly from the unmannerly; the gentlewoman from the underbred woman; the gentleman from the boor. It is the women of a nation who make the manners of the men.

More than thirty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his book, "Democracy in America," from which we have quoted the above tribute to our women, and the accompanying censure to our manners.

The censure and the tribute are as just to-day as they were when written. Quite recently, an American lady, writing to a European grandson, expressed the hope that he might some day leave his country and come to America

to be a business man and an American.

The mother of the boy answered the letter, and the answer so illustrates De Tocqueville's assertion that the compiler quotes a few lines from the letter:

"I did not read G—— what you wrote in reference to his future. I prefer a modest competence here, for my sons, to untold millions in America; and, as for myself, I would rather live in a cottage here, than in a palace there. The self-conceit and pretentiousness of people, who are neither well born nor well trained, spoil the best society everywhere in the United States."

It has been said that there is scarcely any soul born into this world in which a self-sacrificing, steady effort on the parent's part may not lay broad and deep the foundations of strength of will, of self-control; and, therefore, of that self-reverence and self-knowledge which, combined with the possession and love of noble ideas, will enable men and women not only to have good manners, but to be true and useful to God and mankind. The regeneration of society is in the power of the woman, and she turns away from it. The manners of men, the hearts of men, the lives of men are in her hands. How does she use her power? Divers are the answers that might be made to this question-answers which have living witnesses of their sad truth in every circle of society around us. But we leave them all untouched in this chapter, and continue from the same author. There is no sadder nor uglier sight in this world than to see the women of a land grasping at the ignoble honor and rejecting the noble, leading the men, whom they should guide into high thought and active sacrifice, into petty slander of gossip in conversation, and into discussion of dangerous and unhealthy feeling, becoming in this degradation of their directing power the curse, and not the blessing of social intercourse-becoming what men