( 3. ) It is said that secular education—­and the general schools open to all in a community of mixed religions must be secular—­is training the rising generation to be materialists and socialists.

( 4. ) Perhaps a better-founded charge is that a system of equal education, with its superficiality, creates discontent with the condition in which a majority of men must be—­that of labor—­a distaste for trades and for hand-work, an idea that what is called intellectual labor (let us say, casting up accounts in a shop, or writing trashy stories for a sensational newspaper) is more honorable than physical labor; and encourages the false notion that “the elevation of the working classes” implies the removal of men and women from those classes.

We should hesitate to draw adverse conclusions in regard to a system yet so young that its results cannot be fairly estimated.  Only after two or three generations can its effects upon the character of a great people be measured:  Observations differ, and testimony is difficult to obtain.  We think it safe to say that those states are most prosperous which have the best free schools.  But if the philosopher inquires as to the general effect upon the national character in respect to the objections named, he must wait for a reply.

III.  The pursuit of the chimera of social equality, from the belief that it should logically follow political equality; resulting in extravagance, misapplication of natural capacities, a notion that physical labor is dishonorable, or that the state should compel all to labor alike, and in efforts to remove inequalities of condition by legislation.

IV.  The equality of the sexes.  The stir in the middle of the eighteenth century gave a great impetus to the emancipation of woman; though, curiously enough, Rousseau, in unfolding his plan of education for Sophie, in Emile, inculcates an almost Oriental subjection of woman—­her education simply that she may please man.  The true enfranchisement of woman—­that is, the recognition (by herself as well as by man) of her real place in the economy of the world, in the full development of her capacities—­is the greatest gain to civilization since the Christian era.  The movement has its excesses, and the gain has not been without loss.  “When we turn to modern literature,” writes Mr. Money, “from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent—­that some ineffable essence has passed out from our hearts?”

How far the expectation has been realized that women, in fiction, for instance, would be more accurately described, better understood, and appear as nobler and lovelier beings when women wrote the novels, this is not the place to inquire.  The movement has results which are unavoidable in a period of transition, and probably only temporary.  The education of woman and the development of her powers hold the greatest promise for the regeneration of society.  But