for him.  These may be gross and carnal considerations; but Faith asks her daily bread, and fancy must be fed.  We deny woman her fair share of training, of encouragement, of remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her instincts and intuitions.  We say sentimentally with the Oriental proverbialist, “Every book of knowledge is implanted by nature in the heart of woman,”—­and make the compliment a substitute for the alphabet.

Nothing can be more absurd than to impose entirely distinct standards, in this respect, on the two sexes, or to expect that woman, any more than man, will accomplish anything great without due preparation and adequate stimulus.  Mrs. Patten, who navigated her husband’s ship from Cape Horn to California, would have failed in the effort, for all her heroism, if she had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her Bowditch’s “Navigator.”  Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, “I am a woman, ignorant but intuitive, with very little sense and information, but exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I can do all things without knowing anything about them.”  Not at all:  during ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such services; had visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Lyons, Rome, Brussels, and Berlin; had studied under the Sisters of Charity, and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at Kaiserswerth.  Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a woman’s heart, as her stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of her profession better than the men around her.  Of course, genius and enthusiasm are, for both sexes, elements unforeseen and incalculable; but, as a general rule, great achievements imply great preparations and favorable conditions.  To disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract, and cruel in its consequences.  If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten feet with the aid of a springboard, it would be considered slightly absurd to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is precisely what society and the critics have always done.  Training and wages and social approbation are very elastic springboards; and the whole course of history has seen these offered bounteously to one sex, and as sedulously withheld from the other.  Let woman consent to be a doll, and there was no finery so gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but she might aspire to share its lavish delights; let her ask simply for an equal chance to learn, to labor, and to live, and it was as if that same doll should open its lips, and propound Euclid’s forty-seventh proposition.  While we have all deplored the helpless position of indigent women, and lamented that they had no alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the schoolroom, and the street, we have usually resisted their admission into every new occupation, denied them training, and cut