the devil got the hindermost.  The way the laborer’s cause has gone hand in hand in this country the last hundred years with the woman’s cause is a proof of the point.  In the 30’s of the nineteenth century, for illustration, the country was torn by a workingman’s party which carried on a fierce agitation against banks and monopolies.  Many of its leaders were equally ardent in their support of Women’s Rights as they were then understood.  The slavery agitation was coupled from the start with the question of Women’s Rights.  It was injustice that was being challenged—­the right of the stronger to put the weaker at a disadvantage for any reason—­because he was poor, not rich; black, not white; female, not male,—­that is, there has been nothing special to women in the injustice she has suffered except its particular form.  Moreover, it was not man alone who was responsible for this injustice.  Stronger women have often imposed upon the weak—­men and women—­as strong men have done.  In its essence, it is a human, not a sex, question—­this of injustice.

The hesitation of this country in the earlier part of the nineteenth century to accord to women the same educational facilities as to men is often cited as a proof of a deliberate effort to disparage women.  But it should not be forgotten that the wisdom of universal male education was hotly in debate.  One of the ideals of radical reformers for centuries had been to give to all the illumination of knowledge.  But to teach those who did the labor of the world, its peasants and its serfs, was regarded by both Church and State as a folly and a menace.  It was the establishment of a pure democracy that forced the experiment of universal free instruction in this country.  It has met with opposition at every stage, and there is to-day a Mr. Worldly Wiseman at every corner bewailing the evils it has wrought.  He must, too, be a hopeless Candide who can look on our experiment, wonderful and inspiring as it is, and say its results have been the best possible.

It was entirely logical, things beings as they were, that there should have been strong opposition to giving girls the same training in schools as boys.  That objection holds good to-day in many reflective minds.  He again must be a hopeless optimist who believes that we have worked out the best possible system of education for women.  But that there was opposition to giving women the same educational facilities as men was not saying that there was or ever had been a conspiracy on foot to keep her in intellectual limbo because she was a woman.  The history of learning shows clearly enough that women have always shared in its rise.  In the great revival of the sixteenth century they took an honorable part.  “I see the robbers, hangmen, adventurers, hostlers of to-day more learned than the doctors and preacher of my youth,” wrote Rabelais, and he added, “why, women and girls have aspired to the heavenly manna of good learning.”  Whenever aspiration has been in the air, women have responded to it as men have, and have found, as men have found, a way to satisfy their thirst.