THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMAN. 175 



instruction necessarily synonymous with idleness and ignorance ; while 

 a good all-round education is likely to prove more serviceable in the 

 home and in society than one or two supreme accomplishments. Many 

 of us make the mistake of confounding education with acquirements, 

 and of running together mental development and intellectual special- 

 ization. The women of whom we are most proud in our own history 

 were not remarkable for special intellectual acquirements so much as 

 for general character and the harmonious working of will and moral- 

 ity. The Lady Fanshawes and Elizabeth Frys, the Mary Carpenters 

 and Florence Nightingales, whose names are practically immortal, 

 were not noted for their learning, but they were none the less women 

 whose mark in history is indelible, and the good they did lives after 

 them, and will never die. And taking one of the, at least, partially 

 learned ladies of the past — is it her Latinity and her bookishness that 

 we admire so much in Lady Jane Grey ; or is it her modesty, her gen- 

 tleness, her saintly patience, her devotion ? — in a word, is it her educa- 

 tion or her character? — the intellectual philosopher, or the sweet and 

 lovely and noble woman ? 



Modern men want intelligent companions in their wives. But the 

 race demands in its turn healthy, wise, and noble mothers of vigorous 

 children. Only a few of the less worthy men desire simply an upper 

 servant for domestic use, or a mistress for personal pleasure, or both 

 in one, with whom they, the husbands, feel no true comradeship. 

 But do the mass of men want the specialized companionship of a 

 like education ? Does not human nature rather desire a change — the 

 relaxation of differences ? — and do specialists want to be always talk- 

 ing to their wives of literature, art, science, medicine, law — whatever 

 may be their own assigned work ? Would they not rather forget the 

 shop, even though that shop be the library or the studio, and pass 

 into a fresh intellectual atmosphere when they lay aside their MSS. 

 or fling down their brushes ? We must always remember, too, that 

 the conduct and management of the house and family belong to 

 women ; and that, if the wife and mother does' not actively superin- 

 tend those departments which the fitness of things has apportioned 

 to her, subordinates must — subordinates who will not put into their 

 work either the love or the conscience of the wife, whose interests are 

 identical with her husband's — of the mother, with whom reason and 

 instinct, education and affection, create that half -divine power to 

 which most great men have owed the chief part of their greatness. 



Not going all the length of the Turkish idea that women are born 

 into the world only to be the wives and mothers of men — as mothers 

 of women simply keeping up the supply, and that for themselves they 

 are of no account outside their usefulness to and relations with men — 

 it is yet undeniably better that they should be unnoted as individuals 

 and perfect as mothers, rather than famous in their own persons and 

 the mothers of abortive and unsatisfactory children. In this lies the 



