Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/411

Rh this feeling we have the true safeguard of womanhood; and we can hope for nothing better than that the deep, strong voice of social opinion will always be raised against any innovations of culture which may tend to spoil the sweetest efflorescence of evolution.

But, while we may hope that social opinion may ever continue opposed to the woman's movement in its most extravagant forms—or to those forms which endeavor to set up an unnatural, and therefore an impossible, rivalry with men in the struggles of practical life—we may also hope that social opinion will soon become unanimous in its encouragement of the higher education of women. Of the distinctively feminine qualities of mind which are admired as such by all, ignorance is certainly not one. Therefore learning, as learning, can never tend to deteriorate those qualities. On the contrary, it can only tend to refine the already refined, to beautify the already beautiful—"when our daughters shall be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace." It can only tend the better to equip a wife as the helpmeet of her husband, and by furthering a community of tastes, to weave another bond in the companionship of life. It can only tend the better to prepare a mother for the greatest of her duties—forming the tastes and guiding the minds of her children at a time when these are most pliable, and under circumstances of influence such as can never again be reproduced.

It is nearly eighty years ago since this view of the matter was thus presented to Sydney Smith:

If you educate women to attend to dignified and important subjects, you are multiplying beyond measure the chances of human improvement by preparing and medicating those early impressions which always come from the mother, and which, in the majority of instances, are quite decisive of genius. The instruction of women improves the stock of national talents, and employs more minds for the instruction and improvement of the world: it increases the pleasures of society by multiplying the topics upon which the two sexes take a common interest, and makes marriage an intercourse of understanding as well as of affection. The education of women favors public morals; it provides for every season of life, and leaves a woman when she is stricken by the hand of Time, not as she now is, destitute of everything and neglected by all, but with the full power and the splendid attractions of knowledge—diffusing the elegance of polite literature, and receiving the homage of learned and accomplished men.

Since the days when this was written, the experiment of thus educating women to attend to dignified and important subjects has been tried on a scale of rapidly-increasing magnitude, and the result has been to show that those apprehensions of public opinion were groundless which supposed that the effect of higher education upon women would be to deteriorate the highest qualities of womanhood. On this point I think it is sufficient to quote the opinion of a lady who has watched the whole course of this experiment, and who is so well qualified to give an opinion that it would be foolish presumption in any