I fairly confess that, as regards education, I backed down, and that I resolved to confine my criticisms to manner, dress, and general behavior.  In the next room I was more at my ease, finding that ancient Roman history was on the tapis.  “Why did the Romans run away with the Sabine women?” asked the mistress, herself a young woman of about three and twenty.  “Because they were pretty,” simpered out a little girl with a cherry mouth.  The answer did not give complete satisfaction, and then followed a somewhat abstruse explanation on the subject of population.  It was all done with good faith and a serious intent, and showed what it was intended to show—­that the girls there educated had in truth reached the consideration of important subjects, and that they were leagues beyond that terrible repetition of A B C, to which, I fear, that most of our free metropolitan schools are still necessarily confined.  You and I, reader, were we called on to superintend the education of girls of sixteen, might not select, as favorite points either the hypothenuse or the ancient methods of populating young colonies.  There may be, and to us on the European side of the Atlantic there will be, a certain amount of absurdity in the Transatlantic idea that all knowledge is knowledge, and that it should be imparted if it be not knowledge of evil.  But as to the general result, no fair-minded man or woman can have a doubt.  That the lads and girls in these schools are excellently educated, comes home as a fact to the mind of any one who will look into the subject.  That girl could not have got as fair at the hypothenuse without a competent and abiding knowledge of much that is very far beyond the outside limits of what such girls know with us.  It was at least manifest in the other examination that the girls knew as well as I did who were the Romans, and who were the Sabine women.  That all this is of use, was shown in the very gestures and bearings of the girl.  Emollit mores, as Colonel Newcombe used to say.  That young woman whom I had watched while she cooked her husband’s dinner upon the banks of the Mississippi had doubtless learned all about the Sabine women, and I feel assured that she cooked her husband’s dinner all the better for that knowledge—­and faced the hardships of the world with a better front than she would have done had she been ignorant on the subject.

In order to make a comparison between the schools of London and those of New York, I have called them both free schools.  They are, in fact, more free in New York than they are in London; because in New York every boy and girl, let his parentage be what it may, can attend these schools without any payment.  Thus an education as good as the American mind can compass, prepared with every care, carried on by highly-paid tutors, under ample surveillance, provided with all that is most excellent in the way of rooms, desks, books, charts, maps, and implements, is brought actually within the reach of everybody.  I need not point