England?  You will possibly remember that the Birkenhead, with a troop of our soldiers on board, struck and foundered not far from land.  The women and children were at once crowded into the boats, and it was only when, in a few minutes, the ship began to settle that the cry was heard among the men, “To the boats! to the boats! every man for himself!” But the officer in command stood up and shouted, “What! and swamp the women and children?  Die rather!” And those men did die.  Drawn up in military array, without moving a muscle, those men sank into the bitter waters of death, that the women and children might live.[23] That I contend is man’s true nature, to love the woman, and, if needs be, to give himself for her.

It is, therefore, to recognize and strengthen this true nature of man, to get it deeper into him, and not to get it out of him, as I cannot but feel we have hitherto more or less done, to train your boys in this perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such; and to send forth men into the world to “die rather” than save themselves at the cost of a woman, to “die rather” than drive a woman down into those deep waters of degradation and death, that we look to the mothers of the future as the sole hope of the world.  I say again you have got to see that they learn in relation to their own sisters what they have to practise towards all women, however humble, ay, and however degraded, in their future life.  As the great English oaks are built up of tiny cells, so this true manliness must be built up by a mother’s watchful use of a thousand small daily incidents—­by what Wordsworth rightly calls the best part of a good man’s life—­

    “His little daily, unremembered acts
      Of kindness and of love.”

In themselves they seem almost too trivial to mention:—­the easy chair instinctively given up on the sister’s entrance; the door opened for any woman passing out; the cap removed in the presence of ladies, even though those ladies are his own relatives; the deck-chair taken out by the seaside to make the mother comfortable; the favorite cricket-match given up if an expedition has been fixed in which his services are needed; the window raised and the door shut on leaving a railway-carriage in which women are travelling, so as not to expose them to draught; and, when men-servants are not kept, the sister’s bicycle cleaned or the skates polished—­all those “little daily, unremembered acts” of knightly service which the mere presence of a woman ought to inspire in a man.

I am well aware that here again, as Mr. Philip Hamerton points out, the boarding-school presents a difficulty.  As he says, “The worst of the distant school system is that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial discipline; for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great business is to amuse them."[24]