I protest with the uttermost earnestness against the care of human life, of human health, and of human comfort being considered a lower thing and of less importance than good scholarship; or that, when we recognize that months and even years will have to be devoted to the attainment of the one, the arts by which we can fulfil those great human trusts which devolve more or less upon every woman can be practised without ever having been learnt at all.

Do not misunderstand me.  Do not think I am decrying a classical education; and, as the daughter of a great mathematician, it is not likely that I should underrate mathematics as a mental discipline.  I am only urging that they should be subordinated to higher and more practical issues.

I am thankfully aware that these remarks do not apply to American women to the same degree in which they apply to our English girls.  The paucity of domestic servants, and the consequent pressure of necessity, have saved you from the fine lady ideal which we have adopted for our girls and the exclusively book education into which we have almost unconsciously drifted.  You have been constrained to choose some nobler type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail.  Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not having incurred “this Nemesis of disproportion,” and therefore to their combining intellectual culture with practical efficiency.

Why we should have taken this fine lady ideal for our girls, when we take such a much more practical standard for our boys, has always puzzled me.  If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it, though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped attitude on a tall stool for hours and hours every day.  Why should we accept life’s necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls?  No life worth living can be had without drudgery,—­the most brilliant as well as the dullest.  Darwin spent eight of the best years of his life in an exhaustive investigation into the organization of a barnacle—­labor accompanied, as all intellectual work was with him, by a constant sense of physical nausea from which he suffered, till, from sheer weariness and disgust at the drudgery, he ends his researches in his emphatic way with the exclamation, “D——­ the barnacles!” At least a woman’s household drudgery does not end in a barnacle, or in dead coin, but in a living and loved personality whose comfort and health it secures.  Blessed is drudgery, the homely mother of Patience, “that young and rose-lipped cherubim,” of quiet endurance, of persistency in well-doing, of all the stablest elements of character.

Do not let us refuse to our girls the divine hardness which is the very heart of a diviner joy and of that “fuller life” of “which our veins are scant,” nor refuse for them and for ourselves the words of life:  “As the Father hath sent Me into the world, even so send I you”; but be content to send them into the world to love, to suffer, to endure, to live and die for the good of others.