Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/189

Rh instruction necessarily synonymous with idleness and ignorance; while a good all-round education is likely to prove more serviceable in the home and in society than one or two supreme accomplishments. Many of us make the mistake of confounding education with acquirements, and of running together mental development and intellectual specialization. The women of whom we are most proud in our own history were not remarkable for special intellectual acquirements so much as for general character and the harmonious working of will and morality. The Lady Fanshawes and Elizabeth Frys, the Mary Carpenters and Florence Nightingales, whose names are practically immortal, were not noted for their learning, but they were none the less women whose mark in history is indelible, and the good they did lives after them, and will never die. And taking one of the, at least, partially learned ladies of the past—is it her Latinity and her bookishness that we admire so much in Lady Jane Grey; or is it her modesty, her gentleness, her saintly patience, her devotion?—in a word, is it her education or her character?—the intellectual philosopher, or the sweet and lovely and noble woman?

Modern men want intelligent companions in their wives. But the race demands in its turn healthy, wise, and noble mothers of vigorous children. Only a few of the less worthy men desire simply an upper servant for domestic use, or a mistress for personal pleasure, or both in one, with whom they, the husbands, feel no true comradeship. But do the mass of men want the specialized companionship of a like education? Does not human nature rather desire a change—the relaxation of differences?—and do specialists want to be always talking to their wives of literature, art, science, medicine, law—whatever may be their own assigned work? Would they not rather forget the shop, even though that shop be the library or the studio, and pass into a fresh intellectual atmosphere when they lay aside their MSS. or fling down their brushes? We must always remember, too, that the conduct and management of the house and family belong to women; and that, if the wife and mother does not actively superintend those departments which the fitness of things has apportioned to her, subordinates must—subordinates who will not put into their work either the love or the conscience of the wife, whose interests are identical with her husband's—of the mother, with whom reason and instinct, education and affection, create that half-divine power to which most great men have owed the chief part of their greatness.

Not going all the length of the Turkish idea that women are born into the world only to be the wives and mothers of men—as mothers of women simply keeping up the supply, and that for themselves they are of no account outside their usefulness to and relations with men—it is yet undeniably better that they should be unnoted as individuals and perfect as mothers, rather than famous in their own persons and the mothers of abortive and unsatisfactory children. In this lies the