Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/184

170 at great expense, girls who may marry, and so render the whole outlay of no avail. 2.The effect which this higher education has on the woman and the individual. 3.The physical results on her health and strength, especially in relation to her probable maternity.

To give a good education to a boy is to lay the foundations, not only for a successful individual life, but also those for a well-conditioned family. It is the only thing a man can do who has no fortune to leave his son, and is, in fact, a fortune under another form. With a good education, and brains to profit by it, nothing is impossible. From the Prime Minister to the Lord Chancellor, from the Archbishop of York to the leader of the House of Commons, a clever lad, well educated, has all professional possibilities before him—as the French private has the marshal's báton in his knapsack. But to go to the like expense for the education of a daughter is by no means the same investment, nor can it be made to produce the same return. Where the man's education enables him to provide for his family, a woman's may be entirely thrown away for all remunerative results to herself and others. Indeed, it may be hurtful rather than beneficial. At the best—taking things by their rule and not by their exceptions—it is helpful to herself only; for the women of the professional class, like those of the laboring, support only themselves. For which cause, we may say parenthetically, they are able to undercut the men, and can afford to work for less than can those who have wives and children to support. And this is the reason—again parenthetically—why men try to keep them out of certain trades; seeing in them not so much honest competitors for so much work, as the ultimate destroyers of the home and the family itself. In the education, too, of his sons a father discriminates and determines according to their future. The boy intended for commerce he does not usually send to college; nor is stress laid on Latin or Greek or art or literature at school. For the one destined to the law or the church he stipulates for a sound classical training, and ultimately sends him to the university. For the artist he does not demand science; for the engineer he does not demand music—and so on. Almost all boys who have their own way to make are educated with a distinct reference to their future work; and wise men agree on the folly of wasting time and force on useless acquirements, with corresponding neglect of those which are useful. But how can girls be educated in this special manner? What professions are open to them as to men? The medical alone of the three learned, public opinion not yet being ripe for barristers in petticoats or for women preachers regularly ordained and beneficed; while the army and navy are still more closely shut against those ambitious amazons who think there should be no barriers against them in the barrack-yard or on the quarter-deck, and that what any individual woman can do she should be allowed to do, general rules of prohibition notwithstanding. The higher education gives us better teachers, more accurate writers, and