But how low, on the contrary, is the standard of health for woman! A thoroughly strong, able-bodied woman is almost an unknown ideal to American society.

A physician pleading before a legislative committee of Massachusetts a few years ago, bade the gentlemen present he grateful for their happy lot in being exempt from the infirmities that beset women. A very admirable teacher once said to me, "I tell my girls they mustn't complain if they do have to lose a year or two by ill health, it is hardly to be expected they should not."

Michelet treats semi-invalidism as the natural, inevitable, and charming condition of women. A perfectly healthy woman he considers to have lost her great charm. Science makes the astonishing discovery, that on the whole, women average a little smaller than men, and society seems to accept the idea that therefore, the smaller they are, the more womanly. But before we decide upon this puny condition as the necessary state of woman, let us look at some of the facts on the other side, and see what are the possibilities of physical strength and health compatible with womanhood. In the University of Michigan, pursuing her studies equally with the young men, is a young woman from Kentucky, who measures six feet two inches in height, and is well proportioned. She has a younger sister there who is already five feet eight inches high, and growing very fast. At the South, the negro women performed every kind of labor in the field, and were said to plough better than men. In Europe all kinds of hard work are performed by poor women; even yoked with animals for draught. In England women are employed in stacking large bars of iron. In Dahomey the Amazonian guards of the king perform all military duty with equal ease and thoroughness with men. Now, if these things be possible to women of the poorer classes, and of other countries, it proves that it is not her essential womanhood, but her artificial life and her inherited weakness that makes the lady of Western Europe and America an habitual invalid.

And this muscular power, though not the only essential to health, is of the very first importance, and, within proper bounds, is absolutely requisite for the healthy and full development of animal life. It is possible to carry muscular activity too far, or rather to make it exclusive of the exercise of other powers. The gladiator of old was not found to make the best soldier, nor did the wood-cutter bear the fatigues of the war as well as the cultivated citizen. But as a basis for other culture it is all-important. And it is especially needful for woman, for the great peculiar function of maternity requires the finest muscular power. It is the want of it, among other causes, which produces the pains and perils of child-birth, which are almost unknown to women of savage life. "The women of Abyssinia," says a missionary there; "never rest more than two or three days after child-birth," while in luxurious Athens, where women of the higher ranks were kept alike from physical and mental exertion, six weeks of seclusion was considered absolutely necessary.

The German mother begins at the birth of her infant daughter to spin and weave the linen which is to form her dowry in marriage. If all mothers would begin to lay up for their daughters a dowry of muscular energy and nervous strength from the time of their birth, how would the mythical curse be removed from maternity, and the saddest of all deaths, that of the young wife in the first child-birth, be as rare as it is in Abyssinia.

The first requisite for the mother is to believe in a possible happy destiny for her child, and to seek to secure it for her.

One great secret of all art, and therefore of all education, is the nice balancing of the generic with the special or the individual. Coleridge says "this is the true meaning of the ideal in art." False culture, by the emphasis laid upon peculiarities of race, sex, or families, develops these peculiarities more and more, and tends to produce monstrosities, while nature always strives to mix the breed and restore the original type.

Nature has her own boundaries, which she does not pass over, but they are always delicate and nicely adjustable. When the gardener wishes bleached celery, or seedless bananas, or monster squashes, he gives special food in the soil of the plants, or covers them from the sun, or nips off the spraying tendrils, that he may produce the variety he covets, but when the farmer would raise corn or wheat for the millions, he ploughs deep into the soil of the prairie, sows his seed broadcast, and trusts it to the free influences of the sun and the winds, and the harvest that he reaps is reproductive, and may be multiplied for hundreds of years.

It is curious in tracing the progress of both vegetable and animal life upwards towards humanity, to see how nature plays with the secondary distinctions of sex. The great distinction always remains of the fertilizing and the reproductive function; but as regards size, beauty, the care of the young, and all moral and mental qualities, there is the greatest diversity of manifestation. In some species, even, the male builds the nest and protects the offspring from the ferocious mother, who, like Saturn, devours her own children, and sometimes, among fishes, even her mate. So is it in regard to the mental differences between men and women. Few persons will deny that the difference of sex which runs through creation, colors every part of life; and yet the difference is so delicate, and so varied, that I have never heard any broad statement which was not liable to sufficient exceptions to destroy its value. I have again and again asked teachers of mixed schools, What difference do you find between the proficiency of the boys and girls in their various studies? Where differences have been pointed out, they have often been just opposite in different schools, one claiming mathematics, another languages, another grammar, or logic, as specially adapted to feminine taste or capacity.

So, in human education the first attention should be given to bringing out the broad, healthy powers of human nature, not to increasing any peculiar attributes. "How much of life," asked Margaret Fuller, "is the life neither of man or of woman, but of Humanity?" Every mother should seek to lay a firm foundation in this common ground of Humanity, out of which the special flowers will grow more rich and abundant.

Especially should all premature recognition of sex be avoided; nature should be allowed to develop slowly and quietly. Sex must be recognized; the names of brother and sister, the slight difference in costume are sufficient, but in play and work, and especially in dress and manners, the early distinctions between the sexes tend to produce mannishness on one side and effeminacy on the other. The girl's dress may be a little different in form, but why should the boy wear stout gingham or warm flannel, and she be clothed in fragile muslin, or expensive silk? Why should he be able to climb fences or leap ditches without risk to his clothes, and she be kept in perpetual bondage by her ribbons and her ruffles? Look at a boy's simple round straw or felt hat, with a plain band about it, and pity the little girl with her delicate chip and a wreath of artificial flowers. Is it because the girl's physique is more delicate and complicated, that she is thus denied the natural and healthy exercise of her powers, and burdened with a load of finery under which the strong man would halt and stagger? The more delicate the organization, the smaller the lungs, the more absolutely important is perfect freedom of dress and motion, and the more essential is life in the open air. If we must keep any of the children in-doors let it be the boys; they will have out-door life afterwards, but let girlhood have its free play before custom and fashion fetter it forever. So, too, in manners; how many mothers apologize for their unendurable little ruffians by saying, "You know boys will be rude!" Why should boys be rude? Is not gentleman our highest term for all that is honorable and manly? The physical power that is not under the control of higher qualities is rude, but rudeness is not evidence of power, only witness to the want of culture. A sadly pathetic vein runs through Miss Edgeworth's children's stories, especially Frank, in the difference she makes in the life of man and woman. The children make a list of the virtues which should be cultivated by men and women, and courage is put down very low on the woman's side and first on the man's. But there is no sex in morals, and until courage is deemed essential to woman and purity to man there can be no moral perfection in either.

Still more is the direct appeal to sexual differences to be avoided in early childhood. Many foolish parents encourage the custom of having little beaux and juvenile flirtations, and even very young children are taught games in which the boy takes out a girl as his partner, and the reverse. I once saw a dear little girl about four years old put her arm affectionately around the neck of a little playmate, and her father said, "Oh, for shame, you shouldn't kiss a boy." Could he have answered her simple question, "Why not?"

This is one of the important benefits of the co-education of the sexes. Brought up together in schools as in families, side by side, from early childhood, there is no false mystery about their relation. Their common life is developed, and they value each other for individual qualities. I have never found an exception to the statement by teachers of mixed schools, that there is less of nonsense, less of false sentimentality and precocious sexual attraction, than where the boys and girls are kept separate.

In life as in art those characters are the finest in which the distinction of sex is recognized but not emphasized—in which the human nature preponderates over that of man or woman. In the Hercules, the masculine attributes are exaggerated almost to repulsiveness, but in the Apollo they are present, but they never intrude themselves upon our attention. Vigor, freedom, life, and action, the inspiration of genius, joy in existence, are his attributes, and while the muses are feminine, he is the god of poesy and music. So the Milo Venus has all the traits of womanhood, but not in excess, and her sweet, dignified presence reminds us that she is a goddess, and not a weak, self-conscious woman, like the Medicean image. But the type of womanhood in western Europe and America has emphasized all that is weak, all that is sentimental, all that is helpless in woman, and attenuated it to such delicate proportions as to give it a strange and unnatural charm, like the beauty of consumption. Let us recognize it as an exquisite creation of art, not of nature, as wonderful as the pouter pigeon or the saffron rose. The delicate whiteness of the complexion, scarcely tinged with pink, the fine silky hair, the fragile, willowy form, the tiny hand and foot, the languid blue eye, the soft, low voice, the sensitive nerves that shrink from every breath of heaven, and weep at every tale of woe, the slight cough that touches your compassion, the trembling step that appeals to you for help, are not these all characteristic of that fair, frail, lovely being, to whom sonnets are written and homage tendered when she is young and rich.

A celebrated painter once heard a woman of this stamp commended as "very graceful." "Graceful!" he indignantly exclaimed, "weakness isn't grace! strength and agility are the conditions of grace."

One of the services of true art is to hold before us models of beauty which keep the eye pure amid the corruptions of fashion. The Diana does not suggest any training of corsets or wearing of long skirts, yet poetry and fiction have helped to perpetuate this idea of the lady. Shakespeare has given us his Ophelia and Desdemona, creations of this false theory, and I have heard men declare them to be perfect types of womanhood. In Ruffini's charming story of Doctor Antonio, we have the same lovely heroine in our prosaic modern life. But mark how all these women utterly fail in the great hours of trial. All untrue to the demands of their love, all incapable of mating the men who have sought them. But in Portia, in Miranda, in Imogen, we have women in whom is all the charm of womanhood without its exaggeration; they are independent noble existences, capable of living alone, and therefore able to meet nobly all the conditions of life and of love.[28]

We can almost forgive Charles Reade's later flippant creations of women, in whom moral weakness is considered as great a charm as physical delicacy, when we remember the charming picture of health and vigor which he first gave us in "Christie Johnstone."

But while this admirable modesty of nature is the finest grace of humanity, yet there are limits which cannot safely be overpassed. Nature rarely suffers one sex really to pass the common boundary and take on the special attributes of the other, seeming only to permit these extreme cases as warning and landmark. The contralto in woman and the tenor in man are delightful, but when the woman's voice is bass or the man's treble the impression is ludicrous.

In due time the great distinction of sex rightly asserts itself, and the delicate distinctions between man and woman, so easy to feel and so difficult to state, begin to be recognized. Then the broad general law of humanity will come to a more definite and varied expression in special natures. And although the mother will never forget the common ground of humanity which must underlie all training, she will prepare to meet the peculiar claims of her daughter's nature, and help her to understand and appreciate her needs and her powers.

The child instinctively begins to inquire into physiological questions concerning marriage, birth, etc. There is but one way in which such questions should be met—with perfect truth in perfect reverence. To little children, utterly incapable of understanding the truth, the pretty fables of the stork or the angel may be harmless, but all earnest inquiries should be met with the simple truth as far as it can be understood, and the promise of full explanation whenever the mind is mature to receive it. The mother should anticipate this natural need of the mind for knowledge, and should prepare her daughter for initiation into the higher mysteries of human life by an acquaintance with life in its simpler forms, where it is not complicated by human passions. The functions of reproduction in vegetable life are the natural method of instruction, and lead the way to a recognition of the sacredness and beauty of the whole subject. The child's delight in the flowers of the field is easily deepened into intellectual instruction by pointing out the functions of the various organs and their beautiful adaption to use. In the care with which variety is sought the important lesson against intermarriage may be recognized, which fable and theology has surrounded with such fearful imaginings.

Next, the care of domestic animals will naturally interest the child, and from her kittens and her hens she will learn much, without excitement or effort, that will form a basis for the higher truths of human physiology.

The mother should thus always anticipate in her own mind the needs of the daughter, and prepare her for the changes in her physical condition which will come with maturity, in the simplest, the tenderest, and the most reverent manner. Everything approaching to levity or coarseness of speech should be utterly avoided, so that, while the young girl will speak frankly and without shame to her mother or her physician, she will shun light speaking to chance companions as she would blasphemy.[29] And here the great lesson of a high standard of health should be re-enforced. There is no function of woman's nature which in its right exercise does not tend to strengthen, refresh, and revivify her physical and mental powers. If healthy, no one need interfere with any rational enjoyment, any reasonable amount of intellectual labor, or necessary work. All functions will be best regulated by a full, harmonious, normal development of all. And in physiology as in religion, the grand paradox holds true, "that he who loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth it for my sake shall find it."

There is no surer way to destroy the health than to care for nothing beside it; and the most important condition for the young girl approaching maturity is to have her thoughts turned from herself to wide and large interests, and to have her mind and body healthily and regularly occupied. When any organ is feeble or diseased, the thing most to be avoided is fastening the mind upon its functions, so that nervous irritability or congestion is produced. And yet, as I have constantly intimated, the actual mother has to deal not alone with ideal womanhood, in full possession of a birthright of health, but very likely with a feeble and diseased being, who develops new forms of evil in every crisis of life. There she must be the watchful guardian, and recognize the limitations of her individual child, and with wise provision apportion the tasks and the pleasures to her peculiar needs.

While all sickness is the result of broken law, it is rarely mainly the sufferer's own fault; and the mother will tenderly and lovingly shield her sickly child, and show her the rich compensations which are possible to her in mental and spiritual life, though she should never fall into the morbid error of believing physical weakness to be the most favorable condition of spiritual welfare.

But if she is conscientious and true, really seeking her child's best good, instead of the indulgence of the hour, she will be more likely to err on the side of too much care than too little.

Even in such cases, she should seek more a positive than a negative care; striving rather to brace and fortify her daughter against the ills of life, than to shield her from them. "Remember," said wise Dr. Jackson, "the danger is in staying in the house."

For this reason, books especially written for the instruction of girls are often very pernicious. They emphasize certain topics in their relation to woman, and so excite disgust and produce abnormal excitement, where the simple teachings of science, reverently enforced, would produce only a sacred respect for law. The great responsibility of the transmission of hereditary qualities, may be early taught without any mental excitement. A little girl of twelve years old said to her teacher one day: "When you told me to brush my teeth, I thought, why should I—of what consequence will it be, fifty years hence, whether I do so or not; and then I thought that if I ever had a child, if I had bad teeth, she would be more likely to—wouldn't she?" "Yes," replied the teacher with deep seriousness; "and that is a most sacred reason for guarding your own health and strength."

Perhaps no subject has been more fully dwelt upon than the danger of great intellectual activity for girls at this youthful period of life, and it has come to be thought that an idle brain insures a healthy body. But nothing can be more false. The brain, as the ruling organ of the body, requires a healthy, rich development; and this can only be secured by regular exercise and training, fully using but not overstraining its powers.

The usual accompaniments of intellectual study are the cause of this false prejudice. Close school-rooms, late hours of study, restless excitement from over-stimulated ambition, have no necessary connection with intellectual progress. Much of the evil effect of schools comes not from too much intellectual activity, but from too little; from listless hours spent over lessons which under good conditions could be learned in half the time. Mental action, continued after the brain is weary, or when it is not nourished by fresh blood, or under any disadvantages of physical condition which prevent it from being easy and delightful, will injure the system; and will prove a waste of mental power as well as of physical health. The greatest lesson that we have to learn in our mental life, is to value quality of work more and quantity less. Everybody knows how much more exhilaration and less fatigue is experienced from a brisk walk, than from standing listlessly around for double the length of time; and it is just so with mental effort. We want neither feverish, excited work, nor lazy work; but earnest, hard, vigorous effort, ceasing when the brain is weary or the object is accomplished.[30]

I have yet to see the first proof in man or woman, that well-regulated activity of the brain injures the health. I have known many instances where vigor of body was restored by earnest mental life; and I believe that more young women sink into invalidism, or die prematurely, from the want of adequate thorough mental training, than from any other one physical or mental cause.

For we must remember that the brain craves thought, as the stomach does food; and where it is not properly supplied it will feed on garbage. Where a Latin, geometry, or history lesson would be a healthy tonic, or nourishing food, the trashy, exciting story, the gossiping book of travels, the sentimental poem, or, still worse, the coarse humor or thin-veiled vice of the low romance, fills up the hour—and is at best but tea or slops, if not as dangerous as opium or whisky. Lord Bacon says most truly: "Too much bending breaks the bow; too much unbending, the mind." After labor, rest is sweet and healthful; but all rest is as dangerous as all labor.

One great trouble in women's intellectual life is that it is too much mere study, too little work with a purpose. It is all income without an outlet, and that, we know, always produces congestion and disease. Mental dyspepsia might be the diagnosis of many an irritable, unhappy woman. She has eaten, but for want of exercise she cannot digest the intellectual food she has received. An active pursuit, an earnest purpose, is to the mind what out-door air and exercise are to the body. But in our present social system, where it is still considered out of place for a lady to work for her living, it is the hardest problem for a mother to solve, how to supply this most important need of her daughter. Mental and moral influences are as real active agents in hygienic life as material ones. The reaction from asceticism, which despised the body and made it only a hindrance, or, at best, a slave to the soul, is in danger of going so far as to forget the rightful supremacy and control of the mental powers. A high purpose is often the best of tonics, as an agreeable amusement is the most refreshing of sedatives. A determination to live and work has kept many a person from the grave. But it must be a strong, calm, persistent purpose that will have this good effect, not the feverish ambition of an hour. The girl who works to gain a prize or to rush through school in less than the usual time, will doubtless exhaust her nervous system, and bring on disease or feebleness; but she who looks forward to a life of noble usefulness will learn to husband her powers, and make the future secure by wise forbearance in the present.

When circumstances do not supply the needed stimulus to use of the mental faculties, by a demand for present work, the mother may keep before the mind of her daughter the great duty of preparation for contingencies that may arise, and show her how the rapid changes now taking place in our social system may at any time bring her new duties and responsibilities, for which she will need all her physical and mental powers.

When Harriet Beecher was the leading spirit in a girls' society for mental improvement, she did not know that the intellectual gifts there developed would enable her to strike the keenest blow that slavery ever received in this country. When Maria Mitchell studied astronomy with her father she could not tell that a professorship at Vassar College awaited her, and that her thorough fitness for it would prove a tower of strength to the cause of higher education for women throughout the country. Keep the sword bright, keen, and well tempered, and opportunity will come to use it in defense of truth and right.

I have said little, directly, of school education, because there comes in the teacher's influence, and, as regards intellectual training, it is usually better than the mother's. And though the mother should never yield her right of interest and ultimate appeal, yet, having selected a teacher, she should give her generous confidence and conscientious support. But she must always be watchful to guard her daughter's health, most of all against herself. From my own observation I should say that the overwork and over-stimulus complained of in schools is far more often the fault of pupils and parents than of teachers. The calm, steady work which lays a foundation for future mental power, is not appreciated, and brilliant results are demanded at once.

And here I wish to speak of the study of music, as it is usually pursued. From the tradition of David's soothing Saul by his harp, has, I believe, arisen an idea that music is a thoroughly healthful, refreshing influence, with a wonderful soothing power over the nerves. And yet the nervous excitability, and even irritability, of musicians is proverbial. We must make nice distinctions. The influence of hearing music is one thing, the study of music is another. Unquestionably the power of music to lift the mind into fresh regions of enjoyment, to change the current of thought, to rouse and quicken the nervous action, and so to vivify and raise the tone of health and spirits is very great. I have known those to whom it is the best of medicine, and whom I believe it has saved through severe trials, from utter despair and morbidness.

But even listening to music such as we now hear is a high intellectual exercise. A symphony of Beethoven's, with its complicated movements and rich harmonies, is quite another thing from the simple melodies with which Browning so beautifully represents David as soothing the troubled spirit of Saul. And when to these are added the passionate fervor of the opera, the tax upon the nervous system is very great. Properly to hear and appreciate the opera of Fidelio or Don Giovanni or the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven requires as much exercise of brain as to listen to a scientific lecture. I do not deny its value as an influence, but it is a positive value, not a negative one. It is re-creation rather than relaxation, and is no more fit to succeed a long, exhausting day of study than a sermon, or a disputation, or any other change of intellectual exercise. Still more is the study of music, and the practice necessary to acquire command over so difficult an instrument as the piano, a very great tax upon the nervous strength of our young people. Many mothers consider the music lesson only as the using up of so many minutes of time, and think it may rightfully be put into any hour of holiday or rest. I have heard music teachers say that their pupils came to them weary and listless, and their parents seemed to have no idea of the amount of intellectual and even physical exertion which the music lesson required. We cannot all become fine musical performers, but if the mind is well developed, with a healthy sensibility of feeling and culture of imagination, we can get all the influence and enjoyment of art from the works of thoroughly educated and creative artists, and we shall do so with more relish, without the weary remembrance of mechanical practicing uninspired by active interest.

Music leads the way to a world of the greater danger from over-stimulus of feeling and sentiment, than of intellectual work. Few physicians allow enough for the immediate effect of spiritual causes upon the physical health. Cheerful influences, sunny surroundings, happy relations, will save one through heavy tasks of work or privation; but any blight of the affections, any misunderstanding, or treachery of friends, the lowering of one's ideal of life and humanity, will depress the nervous system and ruin the health far more surely than even overwork of the purely intellectual faculties. Often intellectual labor is the true antidote and corrective of this state of feeling.

Theodore Parker once recommended a course of metaphysical study to a young lady, who, from physical weakness and other causes, had become morbidly nervous and introspective.

I have spoken of the importance of thorough healthful training of body and mind in view of the natural conditions of marriage and maternity, which may be the lot of every woman. It is not possible to overstate the importance or the sanctity of these relations, but it is possible to look so much at the mere outside facts of marriage as to ignore its real meaning.

The woman, falsely or carelessly mated, is far less married than she who keeps her ideal high and true and remains single; not because she values marriage too little, but because she has too great reverence to enter into it lightly or falsely. And the mother has far more need to fit her daughter to meet nobly the possibilities of unwedded life, than even the duties of marriage. Marriage is so perfectly natural a state, that it reveals its own laws; and a simple, healthful, happy, trusting love, will guide woman more wisely than much precept.

But in our present social state, the probability for any girl is by no means small that she may be called on to live out her life without entering upon this blessed relation. If she has been taught that woman's sphere is marriage and marriage alone, that only by that means can she hope for a life of happiness, usefulness, and respect, she will probably become a miserable, helpless, lonely, irritable woman—perhaps seeking marriage at any price to escape from the condition she dreads; or failing that, finding life without purpose, occupation, or delight.

But if she has learned that Providence is boundless in its resources, and that when one way is closed, another is opened, so that "all things work together for good;" if she knows that her nature will be far nobler without the form of marriage unless the spirit and truth can be present also, she will find that there is a life open to her a life of devotion to truth, right, and beauty, of service to humanity, and of love just as noble and true as she could attain in marriage. She is not fit to marry until she is fit to stand alone. Unless life has a purpose and meaning of its own to her as well as to her husband, she cannot bring him an equal dower, and she has no test of the new feeling which should take its value from the richness of the life that she is ready to blend with another's.

Nothing marks the progress in the elevation of woman, during the last half century, more than the passing away of the opprobrious use of the term "old maid," which is now rarely heard.

It is possible to remain unmarried from low motives, shrinking from the duties and responsibilities of the relation, or from a worldly ambition for higher station than love can offer. Such sin brings its own terrible punishment with it. But far more often it is from a high ideal of marriage, from true nobility of character, or from devotion to some other relation which seemed paramount, that a woman remains single. How many a woman, hiding in her secret heart the romance that gave a charm to her youth, but did not find its reality in life, has devoted herself to the service of humanity with all the passionate devotion of a lover to his mistress! Of such an one, to whom hundreds of helpless babes looked up as to a guardian and protector, an artist said, "She has the mother in her face." We owe too much to this noble class of women, in art, literature, and philanthropy, and in the service of the country in its most trying hour, ever to forget their claims, and he will be forever stigmatized as unworthy of the name of pure and noble manhood who sneers at the virtue which he cannot understand, or vilifies with opprobrious epithets the noble women whom Theodore Parker—God bless him for the word—called his "glorious phalanx of old maids."[31]

Another wrong is often done to the young girl, under the name of prudence or worldly wisdom, by breaking down her ideal of life, and especially her ideal of the possible partner of her future life. Tennyson speaks of one form of this, in addressing the vain coquette as the possible future mother:—

"Oh, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part, With a little hoard of maxims, preaching down a daughter's heart."

Men often speak of the pain it is to them to see the debasement of woman, because she represents to them an ideal of good, the other nobler self, for which they must strive. Man should represent the same thing to woman. Love should see in its object the very crown and glory of creation.

"The person love to us doth fit, Like manna, hath the taste of all in it."

But the low social standard of morals and manners for man has so degraded him, that the very ideal of manhood is belittled, and the mother warns her daughter not to expect much from her future husband; she has no right to hope for the loyalty of Sir Philip Sydney or the pure ideality of Michael Angelo.

It is a great wrong to man to demand so little from him. All human beings from childhood upwards are stimulated by the opinion entertained of them, and the claims upon them for noble and high behavior. Whatever your own experience, do not thrust the poison of doubt and unbelief in goodness into a daughter's mind. Let her keep her faith and her romance, and look for a hero to win her young heart. True, it is hard to see a Thaddeus of Warsaw with a cigar in his mouth, or to imagine Hamlet with a blue veil about his hat, but nevertheless the race of heroes is not extinct, and the girl had better preserve her faith and her love till the true knight appears, than accept the dreary belief that all men are alike unworthy, and that she must not ask for a purity and truth which exist only in the dreams of romance. Man's low idea of woman has reacted upon him; her elevation will restore him to his true dignity, as equally entitled to spiritual and moral elevation of soul and refinement of manners with herself. It is as demoralizing to young women to hold men in contempt, as it is for young men to have a low idea of women. "In honor preferring one another" is the true condition of love, and no one has truly loved who has not exalted the beloved far above one's self.

But, after all that I have said, perhaps at too great length, I come back to my original thought of the grand art of education as of life. Do not dwell upon petty details or exaggerate accidental peculiarities. Lay your foundations broad and deep in the common ground of humanity. Base your calculations on the sure ground of universal law. Then, gradually, out of this common earth will grow up the special flower, true to its own individual law, which is just as sacred and unalterable as the general law. All the art of the gardener cannot transform the oak to a willow, or produce the blue dahlia, though by its aid the sour crab has become a mellow apple, and the astringent pear, the luscious Bartlett. We need to study the great subject of education more, and to talk less about the special peculiarities of woman's education, and we shall find that the greater includes the less, and that the more thoroughly we develop all the powers of mind, the more eminently will each woman be fitted to perform her own peculiar work in life.

I did once see a man crippled of both legs, who claimed to be specially able to manage a washing-machine because he stood lower than other men. I honored his acceptance of his limitation, but still think the ordinary complement of legs an advantage not to be despised.

The great duty of the educator is to place his wheel so that the stream will fill its buckets evenly. Far more than you can do directly for your daughter, will the great social forces, the influences of custom, society, hereditary tendencies do for her; but you can hold the helm and keep the rudder firmly fixed towards the pole-star of truth and right; and so, from all these forces thus combined, and from the overflowing fullness of a mother's love, always warming and kindling the spirit of life, however much you may err in details, on the grand basis of humanity, and in the consummate perfection of her own individuality you may rear

"A woman nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit still and bright, With something of an angel's light."

EDNA D. CHENEY.

Jamaica Plain, Mass.

[NOTE.—I have said nothing of the father's influence upon the education of girls, simply because I was not writing on that subject, but I do not wish to be suspected of undervaluing it. By the beautiful law of relation between the sexes, a father may often have a finer understanding of his daughter on some points, than the mother, and one of the great needs of our home life seems to me to be the more intimate acquaintance and influence of the father.]

FOOTNOTES:

[28] It is a little curious that Shakespeare even in his age has made these three finest types of women "reading women." Portia was highly educated, Miranda the companion of her learned father, and Imogen sits up late at her book.

[29] The well-educated woman physician should be the friend and counselor of the mother during this anxious period. It seems a strange fact, but it is one, nevertheless, that the nearest family tie does not always lead to perfect freedom and confidence, and a wise stranger can often give the help that even a mother cannot. The physician should here be, not the mediciner to disease alone, but the guardian of health; and the wise woman who has her own experience to guide her, as well as the learning of the schools, can speak with an authority which will be respected when that of the mother fails. Quite as often, perhaps, she will have to shield the daughter from the unwise demands which the ambitious mother makes upon her, as from her own vanity or love of pleasure.

[30] Dr. Carpenter says in his Physiology: "From the moment when an Indisposition is experienced to keep the mind fixed upon the subject, and the thoughts wander from it unless coerced by the will, the mental activity loses its spontaneous or automatic character, and more exertion is required to maintain it volitionally during a brief period; and more fatigue is subsequently experienced from such an effort than would be involved in the continuance of an automatic operation through a period many times as long. Hence he has found it practically the greatest economy of mental labor to work vigorously when he is disposed to do so, and to refrain from exertion, so far as possible, when it is felt to be an exertion."

"Of course, this rule is not applicable to all individuals; for there are some who would pass their whole time in listless inactivity, if not actually spurred on by the feeling of necessity; but it holds good for those who are sufficiently attracted by objects of interest before them, or who have in their worldly circumstances a sufficiently strong motive to exertion to make them feel they must work—the question with them being, how they can attain their desired results with the least expenditure of mental effort."

[31] There lately died near Boston, a woman of eighty years, whose life exemplified the very truth I have been seeking to enforce. Full of courage and zeal, she withstood all the prejudices of her birth and surroundings, freed her own slaves, and then devoted herself with voice and pen to the Anti-Slavery cause, to the enfranchisement of woman, and to every good word and work that she could aid. Her high literary attainments, as well as her earnest purpose, gave her great power of thought and expression, and she was the wise counselor of many of the foremost men and women among the reformers of the day. As her brother-in-law, himself a noble man of high culture, stood by her coffin, with eyes filled with tears, these were the words of his eulogium upon this woman of dauntless courage, firm purpose, and tender heart: "For this dear saint and moral heroine, there is only one word that expresses what she was, and that is LOVE. He that dwelleth in God dwelleth in love. She dwelt in love which went out to win the warmest friends among all sects and conditions of life, and so she dwelt in God. Her love never failed." All who heard, felt how beautiful must have been the private life which could receive such a tribute from such a man. Has such a woman missed the crown and glory of womanhood?



THE OTHER SIDE.

"All mankind must serve; the widest sway Is but the law of service."—FESTUS.

"I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application, but the new system, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them."—JOHN STUART MILL IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY.



THE OTHER SIDE.

"This is a hard world," said a morbid girl of fourteen some forty years ago.

"Yes," answered cheerfully the well-known apostle to whom she spoke, "and God meant it should be a hard world."

When later he himself was caught up into heaven in a chariot of fire, the serene face showed how gladly he had accepted this "meaning" as his Father's will.

It is not so with the greater number of the world's workers to-day. James Mill, to whom we are indebted for some of the very best intellectual work, thought life was not worth having, and was so devoid of spiritual perception that he could get no glimpse of a God in a "world full of sin and misery." This proves nothing as to the universe. It only shows how unhappily one great man has missed the music of the spheres, and failed to catch the "meaning" of God's work.

For mother and child, for teacher and pupil, the first essential point is to accept this fact. Only so, can the sweet order of a divine life be brought out of the chaotic elements stirring in every soul.

The mother, who holds the month-old infant at her breast, and gently imprisons the tiny fingers that would tear her laces, or disorder her hair, takes the first step towards the development of moral consciousness. Let her repeat again and again that gentle restraint, and by-and-by wide open eyes will ask her why, and when it is once understood that food can be had only while the little fingers are quiet, the first foundations of obedience are laid. So far most mothers go, for their own comfort's sake. If they had but the resolution to go still farther, for the sake of the child's life-long content! No child respects the teacher who does not control. All the modern methods—including lavish gifts and the gilding of all bitter pills—fail absolutely before the clearsightedness of youth. If we older people know how to rise to the occasion and thank those who demand the best of us, still more certainly is this to be expected of the young and the fresh-hearted; but if it were not, our duty remains the same.

So much discipline as shall preserve order, develop respect, and make possible such opportunities as the young soul needs, is the first point. It is idle to ask how this is to be secured. No two children can be managed alike, and it is the variety of her tasks which consoles the mother for her daily fatigue, and inspires her for the encounter.

Until the child is taught deference, it is idle to teach it Latin; until it sees the necessity of self-control, and the beauty of self-denial, grammar and mathematics are to be dispensed with. In one word, the foundation of all true development lies in preserving the natural relation of parent and child. Whatever turns the child into a tyrant and the mother into a slave, degrades the ideal of both, and makes any true progress impossible. To do what is difficult and disagreeable with a faithful and cheerful spirit, is the first great achievement, remembering, nevertheless, that God is a loving Father, not a hard Master.

Yet, loving as he is, his laws are inexorable. The baby stumbles, and bruised limbs or swollen lips warn it against the second careless step. Young and tender as it is, severity encircles it on every hand. Is it possible that we are no longer "perfect even as he is perfect" in this regard?

But let us suppose this point gained, a foundation laid, what obstacles lie in the way of the teacher of to-day? The conscientious and well-meant answer to this question, from the majority of persons is, the health of the pupils. Worst of all, this answer comes from the physicians.

We are often told that the health of women now is not as good as it was generations ago, and this has been repeated and repeated until everybody believes it.

A long time ago, I was walking through Broad street in company with John Collins Warren, when I alluded hastily to a severe attack of croup from which my little boy was suffering, and said, impatiently, that it seemed as if all my care might secure for him as happy a babyhood as that of the little things whose frozen heels were at that moment hitting the curbstone.

"You do not ask how many of these children die," replied my friend, "and if your boy had been born down here, he would not have lived six months." We are apt to ignore the large class of existing facts of this same kind.

Civilization has done so much for human health that the invalids who once died, survive; nay, they do more, they marry, and bring into the world other invalids, who need special care; and, whereas, in the old time, out of a family of twelve, five or six would die in infancy with a persistency worthy of a better cause, the whole twelve would be saved by modern science; and not only that, but enter into the statistics which are intended to show how much worse off we are now than the typical men and women of the past.

A few years ago I watched beside the death-bed of a woman who was the only child of an only child of an only child. I mean that for three generations the mother had died of consumption after the birth of her first-born, and in the first instance was herself the sole survivor of a large family. When my friend was born, it was said at first that she could not live, but her father was a physician, and his care in the first place, and removal from a country to a city life in the second, conquered fate.

She did live, she married, and became the mother of ten healthy children, all of whom survive, and died herself at the ripe age of seventy-three.

It is difficult to write upon this subject, because there are no proper statistics. During the seventy-five years that succeeded the settlement of New England, the record of deaths was very imperfectly kept in many places, but no one who gives much time to genealogical research can fail to be impressed with the short lives of the women, and the large number of children who died at birth or soon after.

In those days, the "survival of the fittest" was the rule, and if that survivor happened to live to a good old age, no one inquired about those who did not.

I allude to these facts, as I have done before, not because I think them of much importance, but because it is desirable to set them against the equally undigested facts of general invalidism which have been so persistently pressed of late.

I do not believe in this general invalidism, so far as it concerns women especially. I believe that in no country, in any age, was life ever so reckless, and so carelessly dissipated as it is in America to-day. In Sybaris itself, in Corinth, and in Paris, only a few wealthy people could indulge in the irregular lives which the unexampled prosperity of this country opens to the great bulk of the population.

I am amazed when I see it stated that "length of time cannot transform the sturdy German fraeulein into the fragile American girl." The influence of climate does this in one generation for our Irish and German population. Standing in the mills at Lawrence, the pale faces and constant cough of the operatives will attest these words to any competent observer. During the past three years I have parted with three satisfactory Irish servants, who were in the incipient stages of consumption. I dismissed them because no influence of mine could persuade them to retire early, wear waterproof shoes, or thick and warm clothing.

In a singular preface to the fifth edition of a work which has lately occupied the public mind the author says:

"When a remission or intermission is necessary, the parent must decide what part of education shall be remitted or omitted, the walk, the ball, the school, or all of these."—"No one can doubt which will interfere most with Nature's laws, four hours' dancing or four hours' studying."—"In these pages the relation of sex to mature life is not discussed."

It is necessary to state at the outset, that this preface does not in the least represent the book as it naturally strikes the reader. Women may read carelessly, as they have been accused of doing in this instance, but when hundreds of women, writing from all parts of the country, in private and in public, and without concert with each other, all testify to the same impression received, it is impossible that the carelessness of numbers should always feel the same bias.

It is quite certain that four hours of dancing is far more injurious to a delicate girl than four hours of steady study: why, then, in considering the education of girls, does the author steadily avoid all cases where dancing, late hours, and bad food, have been known to interfere with health?

What satisfaction can any girl find in the fact, that the period of mature life is not covered by the statements in this volume? The period of a working life is included in the years between fourteen and nineteen, and as matters now are, society life is nearly ended at twenty. If the beginning of brain-work were deferred till a girl were jaded with dissipation, how much could be accomplished in season for self-support? Schools vary in varying localities, and since women are hereafter to be elected on every school committee, it is reasonable to suppose that unwise pressure from that source will soon cease.

All figures of speech are misleading, but it is quite fair to meet the statement that we must not train oaks and anemones in the same way, by retorting that that is precisely what God does.

He gives to different plants different powers of appropriation, sets them in precisely the same circumstances, and leaves them.

The sturdy oak, that centuries of storm have beaten into firmness, which fits it to encounter the fiercest blows of the wave; the stately pine, which is to tower as main-mast when the gale is at its height, stand serried or single on the mountain's peak. At their feet nestles the wind-flower, quite as confident of its destiny, although no sun is moderated, no shower abated for its tender sake. It is protected by the very way in which it is made, by its very loneliness, pregnant as that is with the charm of sweetness and color. So might it be with woman!

Private schools in our large cities cannot be said to overwork their pupils. Fifty years ago, when my mother was educated, far more was required of girls at school than was ever possible in my day. Thirty years ago, when my school education ended, far more was possible to me than has ever been required of my daughter. It is the uniform testimony of teachers, that girls now study less, that the hours of recitation are fewer, and that dilatoriness and absences are far more frequently excused than was once the case.

At the most fashionable, and also the best conducted school in Boston fifty years ago, my mother was allowed no study time in school, and committed thirty pages of history as a daily lesson. For myself, at a time when we were pursuing languages and the higher mathematics, we took a whole canto of Dante three times a week, and were required to give an explanation of every historical allusion. I had no study time in school; but neither my mother, nor myself, nor any girls in my class, were in the least injured by anything required of us. During the whole of our school life, we "thought and understood" as children, and very reluctant we were to "put away childish things." We rose for a bath and walk before a seven o'clock breakfast, nine o'clock found us at school, and we returned to a two o'clock dinner. In the afternoon we walked, or rode on horseback, or studied together for an hour. We took tea at six or half past six o'clock, and the curfew ringing at nine found us preparing for bed. We had no time for unsuitable reading, and none of the cares or dissipations of maidenhood perplexed our straight forward way.

If we could secure this simplicity for our children, we should have small reason to be anxious about their health.

What, then, are the drawbacks to a teacher's efforts to-day? If girls are not studying too hard and too much, what are they doing which stands in the way of a true education, taking the word in the broadest sense?

The teacher's first obstacle lies in the superficial character of the American mind. We have scarcely one in the country capable of being a hard student. The whole nation repels the idea of drudgery of any sort, and the most conscientious teacher has to contend against a home influence, which, working at right angles with her own, hardly allows any noble effort.

Next to this is inherited tendency: from fathers fevered with restless mercantile speculation, or tossed between "bulls and bears" in Wall street, or who allow themselves to indulge in practices which their daughters are supposed never to know, girls inherit an "abnormal development of the nervous system," and every fibre in their bodies feels the "twist in the nerves."

From mothers of large families, overworn with house-work themselves, or, still worse, fretted by the impossibility of keeping a home comfortable, aided only by unwilling and half-trained servants, girls inherit a depressed and morbid tendency to call life "hard."

The spirit of the age is also against them. They do not have the help which comes from a trusting religious spirit. The "Conflict of the Ages" has penetrated to the heart of almost every household, and care is too seldom taken to save that love of God and trust in his Fatherly care, upon which the comfort and happiness of the young so much depend. It seems to me that very few parents realize this. If a girl has a loving mother, it is not enough. She needs, still farther, the consciousness of that sustaining Power which holds both her and the universe in its embrace. If she has not a loving mother, how can she endure life without this support?

But let us suppose that the teacher has met and vanquished these difficulties—she has enemies still at hand that our ancestors never knew. The girls whom she teaches live in high houses, piled storey upon storey, so that three or four flights of stairs come between them and the open air—between them and healthful play. The crowd of people who go annually to Europe, and bring home its follies instead of its charms, have succeeded in changing our simple midday meal into a dinner of many courses, eaten under the gaslight. At this meal the young girl finds food very different from the roast mutton, and bread and butter eaten daily by her English sister at the same age. She has tea and coffee at other meals, and probably a glass of wine at this, especially if she is thought to be studying hard. In the afternoon, she has no longer simple, happy life in the open air. Although her ear be so deficient that she may hammer all the afternoon over an exercise that she will not recognize when she hears it well played at a concert the same evening, she is kept at her instrument as if all her salvation of body and soul lay in the keys of the piano.

The irritability which bad habits, bad food, and the want of fresh air develop, needs the counterpoise of a fresh excitement—so a German, the opera, or a tragedy, occupies her evening hours. Three or four days in the week, at least, she is up till midnight, and rises just in time to get to school at nine. She never stands in the cool evening air to see the red sun sink below the hills; she misses the holy calm of the early morning, which falls upon a flushed and heated life as its dews fall on the flowers. Dissipation, either mental or physical, crowds every cranny of her life. Parents object to every lesson out of school, so the whole period of preparation and recitation is pressed into the school-hours. Her dress is wholly unsuited to health; and when I say this, I wish to be understood as saying nothing in favor of bloomers or any other special dress. An intelligent woman can decide for herself and her children as to what need of change there is in her dress; and many of us have worn for half a century clothes that were loose, well adjusted, and healthful, without drawing attention to any peculiarity. Nor must there be any tyrannical dictation on this subject. Some of us prefer to rest our clothes upon our shoulders; some of us are only comfortable when they depend upon the hips. It cannot be denied that the heavily-weighted skirts now in vogue are uncleanly and unwholesome, even when worn short; and while school-girls elaborate, friz, powder, and puff their hair like their elders, and trim their dresses to such excess, it will be impossible for them to find time for consecutive study. Every separate curl, lace, or fold, becomes a separate cause of worry; and "worry" lies at the bottom of American degeneracy, male and female.

Every heart in this country came to a sudden pause the other day, when the name of Agassiz was moaned out by the funeral-bells of Cambridge. Who ever worked harder than he? "Without haste, yet without rest," his summer's recreation became the hardest work of the world; but in his life an ever-flowing cheerfulness, and a genial welcome for any honest soul, showed the healthfulness of his busy walk. If anything shortened his three-score and ten years, it was the care and anxiety which insufficient appropriation and political indifference or chicanery crowded into his later life.

The scholar, young or old, must keep a calm and well-poised mind. Let our mothers consider whether this is possible to children upon whom the follies of mature life are crowded in infancy.

If in idle moments the children of this generation take up a book, it is no longer a simple Bible story, or a calm classic of the English tongue, but the novels of Miss Braddon, Mrs. Southworth, or Mrs. Wood wake them into a premature life of the imagination and the senses. Before they are six years old they hold weddings for their dolls, enact love scenes in their tableaux, or go to theatrical exhibitions as stimulating as the "Black Crook," if less offensive to the taste. The skating parties and gymnastics are also fruitful sources of ill-health. The girl prepares herself for the former by inflating and over-heating her skirts over the register in the hall-floor; a few minutes' exercise chills the hot drapery—what wonder that a morbid bodily sensitiveness follows the insane exposure? No thoughtful person can watch a class of gymnasts, without seeing how extreme and unnatural are many of the attitudes assumed, especially for women. What would be thought of making bread or sweeping floors, if these compelled such attitudes, or brought about such fatigue?

The sleep of these exhausted pupils is often broken, by what has been wittily called a "panorama on the brain," in which the worries, excitements, dissipations of the day, are incessantly repeated, and they rise late, more wearied than they went to bed.

In spite of eminent authority to the contrary, mothers observe that it is their sons who require the largest allowance of sleep, and who keep the morning meal waiting; but if the growing girl cannot sleep, she should be compelled to lie in bed the proper number of hours, and it is obvious, that sleep like that I have described is no refreshment, and furnishes no opportunity for repair of tissue.

"I want to borrow a book, doctor," said a patient the other day to a famous specialist. "Any book upon my shelves, madam," was the reply, "except those which concern the diseases of women," and the lady turned disappointed away.

It behooves all those who have the care of children of both sexes, to bear their possible futures silently in mind; but all talk to them, or before them, all reading upon physiological subjects, during the period of development, should be forbidden, for the reasons that dictated the answer of the specialist; children should be instructed long before the developing period. I cannot tell what might be possible if we had to deal with girls in a normal state of health; but the girls and women of to-day are encouraged to a morbid consciousness of sex; and I believe, that all that relates to personal care should be ordered by those who are the natural guardians of the young, without unnecessary explanation or caution. When development begins, special treatment is required; not according to the sex so much as according to the individual; and no parent or teacher can dictate to another on general grounds. That school or family is an absolute failure which does not allow a margin large enough and loose enough for all possible contingencies, as regards boys or girls.

If any one thinks the picture of youthful life which I have drawn an exaggerated one, let him read the books commonly published, descriptive of child-life, and once convinced, he will not wonder that the "number of invalid girls is such as to excite the gravest alarm." From all the cares imposed by dress, and from much of the weakness deduced from furnaces and high-storeyed houses, boys are exempted by their habits and general custom. If it is thought by any one that the boys of to-day are stronger than the girls, let them be subjected to the same regimen, and the result fairly reported. Let their steps be clogged by skirts, embroidered or plaited into death warrants; let them be kept at the piano or running up and down stairs when they should be in bed or at play; let them read sentimental novels or worse, and hang over the furnaces, instead of frolicking in the open air. We shall understand better, when this experiment is once tried, that God makes boy and girl alike healthy; but that social folly has, from the very first, set the girl at a disadvantage.

Do sisters "imitate brothers in persistent work everywhere?" Nay, it is not the brothers whom they imitate, but their own steadfast, God-implanted instincts, which they thus attempt to work out. Girls cannot do two things well at a time. Then let them resign the life of fashion, excitement and folly, and give themselves to study, fresh air and an obedient life in a well-disciplined home. Every teacher of to-day will tell them, that those girls who go most regularly to school are healthier than those who lead desultory lives, and that among the students of any one school or college, the healthiest are generally those who work the hardest.

This is as true of boys as of girls. It is not the "honor man" who breaks down at college, but he who leads an irregular and idle life. It is true, for the very simple reason, that hard study is incompatible for any length of time, or in other than very exceptional cases, with luxurious habits, over-eating or drinking, late hours, or excessive dissipation.

In this recent work it has been stated, that all schools are adjusted to meet the requirements of men; and in quoting a case which was wholly imaginary, so far as its supposed connection with Vassar College was concerned, the author goes on to say:

"The pupil's account of her regimen there, was so nearly that of a boy's regimen, that it would puzzle a physiologist to determine from that alone, whether the subject of it were male or female." Of course, these words are intended to express disapprobation, and carry a doubt as to the fitness of Vassar College to educate girls. Nothing could be more unjust or preposterous than the conclusions likely to be deduced from this statement.

We are told that from fourteen to nineteen, no girl must be encouraged to persistent effort in study, or anything else. Now, the laws of life are absolute, and if proper habits of study have not been formed by the age of nineteen, they never can be formed in this life; the girl who gives only an intermittent attention to study up to her twentieth year, is prevented by all the influences about her from "intermitting" the press of her social duties, so I will not deny that it was the happiest surprise of my life when the first four years of Vassar College showed me that there were still hundreds of girls willing to come to Poughkeepsie, after they were eighteen years old, and shut themselves out of the world for four years, abandoning gayeties of all sorts, the German, the opera, and the parade, that they might fit themselves for the duties of their future life.

The debt of this country to Matthew Vassar's memory can hardly be exaggerated. In eight years of steady work, the college has contrived to exert an influence that is felt in all parts of the United States and of Canada. This is an educational influence in the broadest sense; it pertains to dress, habits, manners, regularity of life, and sleep; the proper preparation and serving of food, physical exercise, physiological care, safe and healthful study, and the highest womanly standards in all respects.

The college has received delicate pupils, whom she has sent out four years after, strong and well; and it is the rule, that the health of the classes steadily improves from the Freshman to the Senior year.

Vassar has been fortunate in retaining its resident physician throughout the whole eight years of its existence, and if the Faculty were to grow careless, the parents, educated by what she has been accustomed to give, would demand the care that their children need.

The pupils of Vassar belong to no special class in society, and are drawn from varied localities. When the college opened, she had upon her Faculty three women whose peers it would be hard to find, for excellence of character, refinement of feeling, delicacy of manner, attainment in science, and a quiet elegance of dress. Of these, one is now gathered to a wider sphere of usefulness, so we speak of Hannah Lyman by name, as a woman whose equal most of the students would never have seen, if good fortune had not taken them to Vassar. The first pupils of Vassar were thoughtful women, who had been long prepared for its expected opening. They appreciated at once the lofty influence of these examples, and the reverent respect they always showed was impressed upon every succeeding class. These teachers were in every detail of their lives, what intelligent, modest, and cultivated women should be.

As to dress, so far as example and counsel could do it, the pupils were taught simplicity.

As to habits, they were taught regularity, order, cleanliness, and the self-denial in small matters which would prevent then from annoying one another.

As to manners, the courtesy shown by so finished a gentlewoman as Miss Lyman, not only in all her intercourse with the Faculty and the teachers, but to the pupils, in all the minute details of official and social intercourse, took effect, as no lessons born of foreign travel or intercourse with the world could ever have done. It was courtesy growing out of character and conscience; it was not the mere dictation of custom.

To live with such regularity as Vassar enforced for four years, made it almost certain that these pupils would never fail of that divine blessing for the rest of their lives. Their meals were served at the minute, their rising and retiring were at the proper hours, and sleep was as secure as good health, cheerful minds, and moderate excitement could make it.

Their food was of the best material, of good variety, and most careful preparation. It is not too much to say, that none of the girls could ever have seen in their own homes such perfect bread and butter, so abundant milk and meat, or simple delicacies so carefully served without interruption for four years.

Their exercise was watched by the resident physician, and every flagging step or indifferent recitation was supposed to have two possible bearings, one upon the goodwill of the student, the other upon some incipient physical derangement.

Their study hours were carefully regulated by teachers who knew what girls could properly accomplish, and when a question arose it was decided in the only proper way—practically. I was present once when a pupil complained to Hannah Lyman of the impossibility of preparing a lesson in arithmetic in the prescribed time. That night Miss Lyman sat late over her own slate, and by going slowly through every process required of the pupil, justified the complaint and corrected the error.

In all table manners and social life, the girls at Vassar had the highest standard constantly before them, and when they went out into the world at the end of four years, they carried into their varied homes wholly new ideas about dress, food, proprieties, and life.

The conditions of a girl's successful growth, we are told, are to be found in—

1. Abundant and wholesome food. 2. Care in all relating to her health. 3. Work so apportioned as to leave room for growth, beyond the mere repair of tissue, and— 4. Sleep.

In no homes that I know in America, are all these points so completely secured as at Vassar.

Every year, about one hundred girls leave this institution, to take their positions in life. Some of them are to be teachers, some mothers, some housekeepers for father or brother, but they will not go to either of these lives, ignorant of that upon which family comfort depends.

Never again will they be content with sour bread or a soiled table-cloth; never again will they mistake arrogant self-assertion for good-breeding, or a dull, half-furnished "living-room" for a cheerful parlor. They have all been taught the virtue which lies in mother earth, and the fragrance she gives to her flowers; they know the health and power given by the labor of their hands and the use of their feet. Fortunately, the girls at Vassar come under few of the precautions required for growing girls[32] but of those who are younger, it may be said that the impending maidenhood sometimes makes such heavy draughts upon the circulation, that a girl's real safety is found in steady study or persistent manual labor; the diversion of blood to brain or muscles relieving the more sensitive growing organs.

"I have longed to put my word into this discussion," wrote an experienced teacher to me from the city of Portland the other day, "for I hold that hysterics are born of silly mothers and fashionable follies, and I find them easily cured by equal doses of ridicule and arithmetic." The 'arithmetic,' or other severe study that corrects or prevents morbid notions, that diverts a girl's thoughts from herself; her functions, and her future, is in most cases the best medicine.

Of this developing period of life it may be even more safely said than of any other, that "constant employment is constant enjoyment," and this employment, though steady, must be varied, so as to shift the effort from one set of powers or muscles to another.

I am not one of those who believe that girls require more care than boys through this period, if the laws of life are properly observed in both cases; and I think that when women and mothers come to utter words of the same scientific weight on this subject, their testimony will differ entirely from that of the leading physicians who now hold the public ear.

It is claimed that man is made for sustained, and woman for periodic effort. It is by no means certain that this is so, and if it be indeed a law of organization, then it must be a law which will dominate the whole life. It will not only keep a girl back from mastering her tools until the time for using them is passed, but it will interfere with her steady use of them through her whole life, shut her out from the markets of the world, and unfit her for all steady, consecutive duty, either public or private.

Let no girl be deterred from steady and faithful work in the vain fear that she will unsex herself, and to a loving mother's needful anxieties let not this superfluous care be added. True, we may all make mistakes as to what is desirable, needful, or possible, but to the humble seeker after the right way, a clear sight will always come, and to the preposterous cautions, born of a morbid and unwise interference with the courses of life, I oppose these words quoted from that "physiology of Moses," which it is said that we have not outgrown: "Ye shall not offer unto the Lord that which is bruised or crushed or broken or cut;" these words are true, whether spoken of a dove's feathers or a girl's soul; or the still later and wiser words, "Take, therefore, no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." The foundations of true manhood and true womanhood are fortunately laid too deep for our meddling. It is true that we may destroy the perfume of life, for men and women, by mistaken efforts and perverse guidance, but the fruit of our error is not immortal, and it is never too late to retrieve our false steps.

So far from losing what is best in either sex, as we advance in life, we may be sure that increasing years will find it intensified; that so long as men and women live, they may, if they desire, they must, if they are faithful, grow more manly and more womanly. If they draw nearer to each other, as they sit hand in hand looking towards the sunset, it is only because they are both heirs of the immortal, seeking and gaining the same end.

It is impossible to dismiss these considerations without touching afresh the subject of co-education. But we need not rest upon the family fact or the old common school system.

Oberlin was the pioneer in the system of co-education, a system into which she was forced, not so much by fanatical theories as by the cruel hand of poverty. For forty-one years she has held up her banner in the wilderness, and in 1868 I found her with nearly twelve hundred pupils. It was very largely to her men and women that the country owed its safety in the last war. As governors of States, generals of armies, and mothers of families, or teachers of schools, they kept the nation to its duty. From this beginning twenty-five colleges had sprung in 1868. It is nothing to the argument that these colleges may not present as high a standard of classical attainment as Harvard or Yale, if that should turn out to be the fact. For more than thirty years a large number of them have been proving the possibility of co-education, and their graduates are not the unhappy childless women of Massachusetts, but the happy and healthy women of the West, who are strong in proportion as they are busy, and whose "children are plenty as blackberries." Beside these twenty-five colleges, Antioch has been working steadily for twenty-four years, and in addition to the small institutions scattered all through New York and the Middle States, Cornell has lately opened her doors to the same system. All those who have practical experience of its results know how much wiser, sweeter, and more serene is the life that is shaped by its methods.

It is a subject on which argument is alike useless and undesirable. We must observe and be guided by the practical result.

We are told that public duties are more exacting than private. No woman will be found to believe it. It may be often difficult to estimate the heavy stake that underlies the small duty.

"A man must labor till set of sun, But a woman's work is never done;"

and while this distich hints at the truth, it is certain that private life will continue to make upon her as heavy demands as the human constitution will bear. For every reason then, a healthy mind in a healthy body is the first thing to be sought. It is to be borne in mind that the first thing Nature sets us to do, is committing to memory—and experience will show that this is the natural first function of the young scholar. Three languages can be better learned under eight years of age, than the simplest lessons in grammar, arithmetic, or history—unless these are confined to rules, tables, or dates, which may be most profitably committed, exactly as "Mother Goose" is. I take pains to allude to this, because I think great harm has been done of late by the axiom that a child should not learn anything but what it understands.

This is not true of any of us, young or old. We must learn many things before we can understand one; and nothing is so unsuited to young brains, as prolonged efforts to understand. Intellectual processes differ after we become old enough to understand; not only in the two sexes, but in every two individuals. Of this fact we must take heed, or all comfort will be destroyed and much unnecessary work done.

How then are we to lay the foundations of a sincere education? We must begin with the religious, the moral, and the emotional nature. We must sustain the relations God imposes on parent and child.

We must bring the child face to face with the fact that this is a "hard" world. By that I mean, a world in which difficulties are to be fairly met—not shirked, set aside, or "got round."

To help her to endure this hardness to the end, she must be taught a simple trust in God, and an obedient but by no means slavish deference towards parents, teachers, and elders.

Without this trust and this obedience, every child leads an unhappy and unnatural life; and their existence may be made sure without one word of dogmatic teaching. Having given to the well-poised mind these inward helps, which all true growth requires, we must secure simple food, easy dress, regular meals, and the proper quantity of sleep.

The child is then prepared for the steady work of mind and body which will develop both.

While we do everything to make knowledge attractive and to stimulate thought when the time for thought arrives, we must be careful never to yield to the superficial demands of our people. The Kindergarten, which is refreshment and help to the plodding German child, may become a snare to the light-minded American.

When the period of development arrives, study should be carefully watched to make sure there is no overwork; the character of the reading and the lessons should be guided, so that neither may tend to excite a precocious development of the passions or the senses.

Anatomy may be profitably studied at this period; but just as the specialist turned his patient away from his loaded shelves, lest her own maladies should be increased by a morbid study of their source, I would keep developing girls and boys from a careful study of their own functions.

If they are trained to quiet obedience, they will grow up in health precisely in proportion to the skill with which their thoughts are diverted from themselves to subjects of wider interest and more entertaining suggestion.

In conclusion I must say, that education is to be adapted neither to boys nor to girls, but to individuals.

The mother, or the teacher, has learned little who attempts to train any two children alike, whether as regards the books they are to study, the time it is to take, the attitudes they are to assume, or the amusements they are to be allowed.

CAROLINE H. DALL.

141 Warren Avenue, Boston.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Pupils usually enter at or after the age of eighteen.



EFFECTS OF MENTAL GROWTH.

"Clear away the parasitic forms That seem to keep her up, but drag her down; Leave her space to bourgeon out of all Within her."



EFFECTS OF MENTAL GROWTH

A few years since, when Mr. Higginson's essay "Ought Women to learn the Alphabet?" first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and I was reading some of its keen sarcasms to a gentleman just returned from a tour of Eastern travel, he related a bit of his recent experience in the old city of Sychar, in Samaria. There was pointed out to him as an object of great interest and attention, a remarkable girl. She was the theme of animated discussion throughout all the neighborhood of Ebal and Gerizim—the observed of all observers, when she appeared on the street, or went with the maidens of Sychar to draw water from Jacob's well, still the glory of their city. This little maiden's distinction was that she was the first girl in that old city, who, during a period of nine hundred years, had transcended the allotted sphere of woman in so bold a step as that of going to school and learning to read. There had been no special purpose in the act. She had been attracted by the mysterious sounds from the room where boys were taking their first lessons in Talmudic law and lore, and had gratified her curiosity by learning what they meant. "It whistled itself," averred the little school-boy, apologetically, under fear of the rod; so she, another it, learned itself.

It was not until the steps of other little maidens were also tending towards school, that the gravity of her transgression, and the danger of the innovation, were at all comprehended. Then there was indeed an excitement among the orthodox Samaritans. In the opinion of the staunch appellants to the Law and the Prophets, she had transcended the limitations of her sex, and the marital claim, "My wife is my shoe" was ominously threatened. Sychar had not been so roused for ages. The scribes and prophets waited in expectancy to see fire from heaven descend upon a city where such things had been suffered, or to see the young transgressor transformed, by the judgments of heaven, out of the proper semblance of womanhood. But when she appeared in the streets, with her sister maidens, performed her appointed tasks in rank and file with them, talked and chatted as heretofore—though perhaps gossiped less—and bore her pitcher as deftly on her head as ever, the matter began to die away, and she was only pointed out as the one who had first sinned. True, the High Priest shook his head and prophesied "The end is not yet." But the fire had caught, and, according to the laws of fire, physical or Promethean, it spread, until between the mountains of blessing and cursing, a dozen Samaritan girls had learned the alphabet.

How far education has advanced in Sychar, what has been its effects upon the health of Samaritan women, or how much it has shaken the social basis, "My wife is my shoe," I have had no very late opportunities for learning; but, judging from the effects of learning the alphabet in other places, I cannot doubt that this innovation, seeing it did not precipitate the world out of its course, has been followed by others, less startling, perhaps, but tending the same way. Be this as it may, this initiate of an educational revolution in Sychar has its lessons for our times.

The Rabbis of the old Samaritan capital saw in this unlooked for seizure of the key of knowledge by the hand of a woman, a second fall, and to them the world again gave "signs of woe that all was lost." This Miltonian cry of woe to the world, through knowledge or privilege given to woman, has been repeated in every age by Rabbis and High Priests, who find the Eden of life in the poet's picture of the human family, before woman aspired to taste the fruit of the tree "to be desired to make one wise;" when there was as yet no misunderstanding of the object for which man and woman each were made: "He, for God only; she, for God in him." That the world was a paradise while man's wisdom sufficed for her who was to behold God only through him, has been the teaching of creeds not yet dead. There is a lesson in the little Samaritan maiden's repetition of the first transgression, as well as in its repetition a thousand times since. He that runneth may read in it this moral of the symbol, legend, or verity of Holy Writ, whichever way we may regard the story of the bite of the apple, viz.: that a desire to know was evidently an element in woman's original psychical nature, be it original sin, or otherwise; and correspondingly endowed, as is, just as evidently, her physical organization, to gratify this desire, we may conclude that she will compel some of the educational institutions of the age to her service in its accomplishment.

I am glad that the recent alarm of Dr. Clarke, certainly the most rousing of our time, has been sounded. Rung out from his high tower of professional eminence and authority, it must and does attract attention. It is a cry of "Halt!" and let us see where we are going. So, rude and harsh as are many of its tones, discordant with truth as we can but believe some of his statements, and more of his conclusions, I am glad it has been sounded. His facts are momentous. Let us heed them, and charge the sin where it belongs. The book will lead to investigations and in the end to an improvement in methods, and a higher, more thorough, education of women. Dr. Clarke thinks "that if it were possible to marry Oriental care of woman's organization to her Western liberty and culture of the brain, there would be a new birth, and a loftier type of womanly grace and force." But his conclusions seem to be that this is impossible, and, since they cannot be united, of the two types of women, the brain-cultured, intellectual women of the West, and the Oriental women, "with their well developed forms, their brown skins, rich with the blood and sun of the East," he prefers the latter.

Two years since I visited some portions of the East, where these primitive Oriental types of womanhood are to be seen. Sometimes in the gardens of a harem, I have seen them, sitting, lolling, gossiping life away, only careful to guard their veiled faces from exposure, no matter if the rest of the body were as destitute of covering as their souls were of feeling, or their brains of thought. I saw more frequently another class of women—those from whom poverty had rent the veil—some still clinging to a filthy rag, or diverting a more filthy shred from the tatters of their garments to cover their faces, because, as a sheik explained to me, "cause she shame she's woman." Desiring to compare the length of the life of woman, under such conditions, with that of life which we have been wont to call civilized and enlightened, I often inquired the age of women whom we saw, and was surprised at being as often assured that women whose furrowed, wrinkled faces would indicate that they were sixty, were not more than thirty-eight—at most, forty years old. Most Eastern women that I saw, exemplified the "Oriental care of woman's organization" by abandoning their own to a mere animal vegetation. They had borne children innumerable. These swarmed upon us from fissures in the rocks, from dens, caves, and old tombs in the mountain sides—a scrofulous, leprous progeny of wretchedness, with a few fairer types, to which some principle of "natural selection" had imparted strength to rise above the common conditions of life.