Every one of the agencies that I have named aims to do good educational work; every one is competent to do such work; nearly every one does much of it.  I am finding fault with them only so far as they succeed in persuading readers that they are better educated than they really are.  In this respect such agencies are precisely on a par with the proprietary medicine that is an excellent laxative or sudorific, but is offered also as a cure for tuberculosis or cancer.

I once heard the honoured head of a famous body that does an enormous amount of work of this sort deliver an apologia, deserving of all attention, in which he complained that his institution had been falsely accused of superficiality.  It was, he said, perfectly honest in what it taught.  If its pupils thought that the elementary knowledge they were gaining was comprehensive and thorough, that was their fault—­not his.  And vet, at that moment, the institution was posing before its pupils as a “university” and using the forms and nomenclature of such a body to strengthen the idea in their minds.  We cannot acquit it, or any of the agencies like it, of complicity in the causation of the malady whose symptoms we are discussing.

It is not the fault of the women’s clubs that they have fallen into line in such an imposing procession as this.  Their formation and work constitute one of the most interesting and important manifestations of the present feminist movement.  Their role in it is partly social, partly educational; and as they consist of adults, elementary education is of course excluded from their programme.  We therefore find them committed, perhaps unconsciously, to the plan of required or recommended reading, in a form that has long been the bane of our educational systems both in school and out.

One of the corner-stones of this system is the idea that the acquisition of information is valuable in itself, no matter what may be the relationship between it and the acquiring mind, or what use of it may be made in the future.  According to this idea, if a woman can once get into her head that the Medici were a family and not “a race of people,” it matters little that she is unfitted to comprehend why they are worth reading about at all, or that the fact has nothing to do with what she has ever done or is likely to be called upon to do in the future.

That the members of these clubs are willing to pursue knowledge under these hampering conditions is of course a point in their favour, so far as it goes.  A desire for knowledge is never to be despised, even when it is not entertained for its own sake.  And a secondary desire may often be changed into a primary one, if the task is approached in the right way.  The possibility of such a transformation is a hopeful feature of the present situation.