EDUCATION. 145 



full million of male students, and another million of women 

 students, in the place of the 2,000 or so male and the few 

 hundreds of female students that we have at present." 

 So says a Memorial recently handed in to Parliament by a 

 Committee of leading men interested in Agriculture, includ- 

 ing late Ministers of Agriculture. Is there not a Troiel 

 ofioLO) for ourselves in that Memorial ? 



By the side of these countries Italy also has its own house- 

 keeping schools, Spain has some beginnings, as at San 

 Ferdinando, and even Russian Poland has a " Ziemianki " 

 (women landowners) society to show. Everywhere the 

 recognition of the great social and economic regulation of 

 the subject has forced it to the front. Organisation and 

 comparative extension seem most perfected in Belgium. 

 There are the ecoles mhiageres and above all things the most 

 useful Cercles de Fermieres, which gather in pupil recruits. 

 In 1909 the number of cercles — the formation of which was 

 only begun in 1906, — was sixty-five, with 6,162 members. 

 However, the parent country of all, probably, in the United 

 States, from which M. de Vuyst, the originator of the 

 Belgian movement, admits that he brought over the idea 

 as a Promethean spark abstracted from a transatlantic 

 Olympus. In Europe, apart from France, the movement 

 as an organised movement is accordingly only about ten 

 years old. In America it began earlier. And what matured 

 it more rapidly there than happened in Europe probably 

 was the marked preponderance of women teachers among 

 the instructing staffs of rural schools, ^^'omen naturally 

 think of their own sex and, thanks to their initiative and 

 their keen perception of the necessity of agricultural educa- 

 tion, in a country of farmers, rudimentary lessons upon 

 Agriculture and rural life, which latter Mr. Roosevelt, 

 while President, tried so hard to improve (appointing a 

 Commission of Inquiry on the subject), have become a stand- 

 ing feature in a large number of rural elementary schools. 

 In the United States women's gatherings — seeking generally 

 at their local centres the support and shelter of established 

 and recognised male organisations — are organising female 

 education by counties. Their organisation is practically 



