Page:Letters of a Javanese princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, 1921.djvu/280

 wait a long time. I think always of your father's words, "Why not do what can be done at once—something will have been accomplished then, while in Holland everything would lie far in the future." Your father spoke of the wounded man who called for help; some one comes to him and says, "No friend—I cannot help you now, I must first study, and learn how wounds should be dressed." Then the some one goes away, and when at last he had learned the art of binding wounds, the man who had called to him, had long been dead.

Then your father spoke of a pearl lying deep in the sea. You know that it is there but you do not know precisely where. You wade out into the sea and try to find it. The water comes up to your lips, some one calls to you and says—"Friend do not do that, go no further. The water already comes up to your lips, if you are drowned, still you will not have the pearl; get into a boat, measure and fish for it."

Your father said we could open a school at once without having to pass a single examination. There is nothing in the law that compels one to pass examination before teaching native girls. We could get some European teachers to help us, that would be as we wished, but do you think it would be well for us to open it at all without adequate preparation? It is true that in "Our School" (how pleasant that sounds) we want to give more of a moral than an academic education. If it is not erected by the Government we would not have to follow the prescribed paths, and we want the whole idea of our school to be the education of children, not as though they were in a school, but in a home, as a mother would bring up her own children.

It must be like a great home community. Where the inmates all love one another and learn from one another, and where the mother is not a mother in name but in spirit, the educator of the child's soul and body.

We have thought much about that other idea of your father's; but in —258—