HIGHER EDUCATION TOR WOMAN. 309 



among the ladies of Toronto, and of Ontario generally, such a desire 

 for higher culture, and such a willingness to do the work of actual 

 students : not by mere attendance on popular or semi-popular lectures; 

 but by an actual grappling with the difficulties and pleasant toils indis- 

 pensable to the mastery of all science and true scholarship, as to render 

 it desirable to organize a scheme for their higher education. 



Among many signs of the times, we cannot overlook, as a very signi- 

 ficant one, the movement in England, the United States, and elsewhere, 

 for what it termed " Woman's Rights." It has been embalmed in the 

 permanent literature of the age in '' The Princess" of Tennyson ; and 

 enforced anew by the greatest of England's poetesses in her '' Aurora 

 Leigh." Amid many follies, inseparable from any great movement, 

 it has its undercurrent of genuine worth, replete with promise for the 

 future. In our own Province it has recently manifested itself in a 

 very practical form, in the successful assertion of equal rights for girls 

 and boys to the advantages of the Grammar Schools ; and with that 

 secured, it need not surprise us to find it already being followed up by 

 demands for a share in those higher privileges for which such schools 

 are rightly regarded as preparatory. 



At the very initiation of a movement for the higher education of 

 woman, aud so for securing for her similar advantages to those enjoyed 

 by young men at Universities, it is important to recognise very clearly 

 all that is implied in the distinction between school and college. It is 

 not the number of pupils that constitutes the diflference. The gathering 

 togethier of scores, or hundreds of boys or girls into one great building, 

 and giving it a high-sounding name, — though sanctioned by decrees of 

 Parliament, or by charter under the Royal sign-manual itself, — will not 

 in any degree help to solve the problem. 



A considerable amount of all education must of necessity be acquired 

 arbitrarily, and with, at best, but a negative volition. The child learns 

 that indispensable preliminary to knowledge, the alphabet, without per- 

 ceiving any utilicy in its troublesome phonetic symbols; spelling, read- 

 ing, the multiplication table, and much else follow, and are mastered 

 in like manner, at the dictation of others, with scarcely a thought of 

 any ulterior use to be derived from them. Under the aptest and most 

 gifted instructor the studies of school girls or boys must be carried on 

 in obedience to his will, and guided by his perception of a higher aim, 

 rather than their own. The reasoning faculty, as applied at times by 

 a precocious child to such rudimentary studies, retards instead of accele- 



