Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/474

 step by step, with the dispersion of the graduates and under-graduates of this University throughout the land, I cannot dispossess myself of the belief that there is a close connection between the two phenomena. I believe that the training and education of the women of India is a necessary consequence of your own culture. You will not rest satisfied until the female members of your families are able to meet you on a common intellectual level. Man's imperfect nature craves for sympathy in his toils, aspirations, doubts, and anguish, and where shall he find the sympathy and loving help for which his soul earns, if not amongst the women of his family, who know his strength and his weakness, and love him none the less for his imperfections? The need of intellectual companionship in the home is a powerful motor, impelling you to set the educational system of women on a satisfactory basis. But this is not the only force at work. A stronger one, probably, is the natural desire of women not to be left on a confessedly lower level than yourselves, to say nothing of your own honest convictions that educated woman is best fitted by her counsel, sympathy, and encouragement, to strengthen your own efforts in mental and moral advancement. These forces are silently, but most surely, and irresistibly, influencing thought and conduct. Every graduate who leaves these walls, if he is himself imbued with the true spirit of learning, of necessity becomes an advocate of female education. The difficulties before you in putting your desires into practice are neither few nor unimportant, but I doubt not that the women upon whom the spirit of knowledge and wisdom has already descended, will be your strongest supporters in those domestic reforms which may favor the sound teaching of useful knowledge to the females of India. Tour most ancient lawgiver, though his ideas of woman's fitness for learning were not in accord with modern thought, forcibly impresses upon you the obligation of doing honor to woman. He says, "Where females are honored, there the Deities are pleased, but where they are dishonored, there all religious acts become fruitless," and again "where female relations are made miserable, the family of him who makes them so, very soon wholly perishes, but where they are not unhappy, the family always increases." How can you honor and add to the happiness of your womankind better than by making them partakers of your intellectual pursuits, as well as the sharers in your domestic joys and sorrows ?

It is expected that wherever your duties may call you, you