of view.  My work might show the bias of sex, but it dealt with the larger questions which were common to humanity; and when I recall the causes which I furthered, and which in some instances I started, I feel inclined to magnify the office of the anonymous contributor to the daily press.  And I acknowledge not only the kindness of friends who put some of the best new books in my way, but the large-minded tolerance of the Editors of The Register, who gave me such a free hand in the treatment of books, of men, and of public questions.

CHAPTER XIII.

MY WORK FOR EDUCATION.

I was the first woman appointed on a Board of Advice under the Education Department, and found the work interesting.  The powers of the board were limited to an expenditure of 5 pounds for repairs without applying to the department and to interviewing the parents of children who had failed to attend the prescribed number of days, as well as those who pleaded poverty as an exewe for the non-payment of fees.  I always felt that the school fees were a heavy burden on the poor, and rejoiced accordingly when free education was introduced into South Australia.  This was the second State to adopt this great reform, Victoria preceding it by a few years.  I objected to the payment of fees on another ground.  I felt they bore heavily on the innocent children themselves through the notion of caste which was created in the minds of those who paid fees to the detriment of their less fortunate school companions.  And again, education that is compulsory should be free.  Other women have since become members of School Boards. but I was the pioneer of that branch of public work for women in this State.  It is a privilege that American women have been fighting for for many years—­to vote for and to be eligible to sit on School Boards.  In many of the States this has been won to their great advantage.  In this present year of 1910 Mrs. Ella, Flagg Young, at the age of 65, has been elected by the Chigago Board, Director of the Education of that great city of over two millions of inhabitants at a salary of 2,000 pounds a year, with a male university professor as an assistant.  At an age when we in South Australia are commanding our teachers to retire, in Chicago, which is said by Foster Fraser to cashier men at 40, this elderly woman has entered into her great power.

It is characteristic of me that I like to do thoroughly what I undertake to do at all, and when, on one ocasion I had not received the usual summons to attend a board meeting, I complained of the omission to the Chairman.  “I do not want,” I said, “to be a merely ornamental member of this board.  I want to go to all the meetings.”  He replied, courteously, “It is the last thing that we would say of you, Miss Spence, that you are ornamental!” It was half a minute before he discovered that he had put his disclaimer in rather a different form