We are, indeed, fully prepared to believe that the bearing of children may, and ought, to become as free from danger and long disability, to the civilized woman, as it is to the savage; nor is it improbable that, as society advances towards its right organization, motherhood will occupy a less space of woman’s life than it has hitherto done.  But still, unless the human species is to come to an end altogether—­a consummation which can hardly be desired by even the most ardent advocate of “women’s rights”—­somebody must be good enough to take the trouble and responsibility of annually adding to the world exactly as many people as die out of it.  In consequence of some domestic difficulties, Sydney Smith is said to have suggested that it would have been good for the human race had the model offered by the hive been followed, and had all the working part of the female community been neuters.  Failing any thorough-going reform of this kind, we see nothing for it but the old division of humanity into men potentially, or actually, fathers, and women potentially, if not actually, mothers.  And we fear that so long as this potential motherhood is her lot, woman will be found to be fearfully weighted in the race of life.

The duty of man is to see that not a grain is piled upon that load beyond what Nature imposes; that injustice is not added to inequality.

III.

A LIBERAL EDUCATION:  AND WHERE TO FIND IT.

The business which the South London Working Men’s College has undertaken is a great work; indeed, I might say, that Education, with which that college proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all those which lie ready to a man’s hand just at present.

And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognised.  You cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more or less confused and contradictory talk on this subject—­nor can you fail to notice that, in one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like discussions in former days.  Nobody outside the agricultural interest now dares to say that education is a bad thing.  If any representative of the once large and powerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed this opinion, still exists in a semi-fossil state, he keeps his thoughts to himself.  In fact, there is a chorus of voices, almost distressing in their harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine that education is the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the country is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated.

The politicians tell us, “you must educate the masses because they are going to be masters.”  The clergy join in the cry for education, for they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel into the broadest infidelity.  The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily.  They declare that ignorance makes bad workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam engines, cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod!  Ichabod! the glory will be departed from us.  And a few voices are lifted up in favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the people perish for lack of knowledge.