Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/573

 not worthy of equal sacrifices? Are you doing your duty by your daughters in sending them to school only during infancy and the two or three years that follow it, removing them from instruction when their minds are just beginning to find pleasure in the acquisition of knowledge? The evil is not merely that their education makes no further advance, but that the very little they learnt at school rapidly fades away, and along with it there vanishes the taste for reading and culture, the seeds of which had begun to germinate when they were withdrawn by social custom to the comparative seclusion of the domestic circle. The male members of the family, if they happen themselves to be educated, do occasionally strive to keep the last traces of school life from being effaced from the minds of the girls of the household. But even this is rare; and I believe I am correct in saying that in the majority of households no attempt is made to continue the education of girls after they leave school, and that, consequently, within a few years their minds are in much the same condition as are those of girls who have not been to school at all. You profess to have received pleasure and profit from the education you yourselves have received. Try to imagine the knowledge you have gained, and the tastes you have acquired, during your school and college life, obliterated. Would life appear in such circumstance to be worth living? Would it not, to say the least, have lost one of its greatest charms? Yet this is the condition to which social custom condemns the majority of your women. I do not say that their lives are joyless lives, but I do say that they are denied the means of experiencing some of the keenest and purest enjoyments a human being is capable of. This selfishness, which practically shuts out one-half of society from the pleasure-giving and refining influences of literature, science, and art, is a reproach to educated men. And think, gentlemen, how much you yourselves lose in being deprived of the sympathetic companionship of your wives and sisters. The intellectual pursuits which have occupied your time during these past years being entirely foreign to them, they cannot share with you that supreme satisfaction which the victories of the intellect bestow, nor can they help you to bear the trials and disappointments that attend the steps of the seeker after knowledge.

And what about your children? If you wish your women to be something more than the physical mothers of your children, you must see to it that they are educated. The influence of the mother's character on her children during infancy is admitted by everybody. Yet how few realize what that means! How can an