In a characteristically English way it was individual effort which came to change the face of things, and honour is due to the pioneers who went first, facing opposition and believing in the possibilities of better things.  In some other countries the State would have taken the initiative and has done so, but we have our own ways of working out things, “l’aveugle et tatonnante infaillibilite de l’Angleterre,” as some one has called it, in which the individual goes first, and makes trial of the land, and often experiences failure in the first attempts.  From the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the “Vindication of the Rights of Women” was published by Mary Wollstonecraft, the question has been more or less in agitation.  But in 1848, with the opening of Queen’s College in London, it took its first decided step forward in the direction of provision for the higher education of women, and in literature it was much in the air.  Tennyson’s “Princess” came in 1847, and “Aurora Leigh” from Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1851, and things moved onward with increasing rapidity until at one moment it seemed like a rush to new goldfields.  One university after another has granted degrees to women or degree certificates in place of the degrees which were refused; women are resident students at some universities and at others present themselves on equal terms with men for examination.  The way has been opened to them in some professions and in many spheres of activity from which they had been formerly excluded.

One advantage of the English mode of proceeding in these great questions is that the situation can be reconsidered from time to time without the discordant contentions which surround any proclamation of non-success in State concerns.  We feel our way and try this and that, and readjust ourselves, and a great deal of experimental knowledge has been gained before any great interests or the prestige of the State have been involved.  These questions which affect a whole people directly or indirectly require, for us at least, a great deal of experimenting before we know what suits us.  We are not very amenable to systems, or theories, or ready-made schemes.  And the phenomenon of tides is very marked in all that we undertake.  There is a period of advance and then a pause and a period of decline, and after another pause the tide rises again.  It may perhaps be accounted for in part by the very fact that we do so much for ourselves in England, and look askance at anything which curtails the freedom of our movements, when we are in earnest about a question; but this independence is rapidly diminishing under the more elaborate administration of recent years, and the increase of State control in education.  Whatever may be the effect of this in the future, it seems as if there were at present a moment of reconsideration as to whether we have been quite on the right track in the pursuit of higher education for women, and a certain discontent with