Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/413

Rh On the contrary, I believe that this system represents the greatest single reform that has ever been made in the way of education. I am only pointing out certain grave abuses of the system which are to be met with in some of these schools, and against which I should like to see the full force of public opinion directed. There is no public school in the kingdom where a boy of sixteen would be permitted to work from eleven to eighteen hours a day, with no other exercise than a few minutes' walk. Is it not, then, simply monstrous that a girl should be allowed to do so? I must confess that I have met with wonderfully few cases of serious breakdown. All my informants tell me that, even under the operation of so insane an abuse as I have quoted, grave impairment of health but rarely occurs. This, however, only goes to show of what good stuff our English girls are made; and therefore may be taken to furnish about the strongest answer I can give to the argument which I am considering—viz., that the strength of an average English girl is not to be trusted for sustaining any reasonable amount of intellectual work. Upon this point, however, there is at the present time a conflict of medical authority, and, as I have no space to give a number of quotations, it must suffice to make a few general remarks.

In the first place, the question is one of fact, and must therefore be answered by the results of the large and numerous experiments which are now in progress; not by any a priori reasoning of a physiological kind. In the next place, even as thus limited, the inquiry must take account of the wisdom or unwisdom with which female education is pursued in the particular cases investigated. As already remarked, I have been myself astonished to find so great an amount of prolonged endurance exhibited by young girls who are allowed to work at unreasonable pressure; but, all the same, I should of course regard statistics drawn from such cases as manifestly unfair. And seeing that every case of health impaired is another occasion given to the enemies of female education, those who have the interests of such education at heart should before all things see to it that the teaching of girls be conducted with the most scrupulous precautions against over-pressure. Regarded merely as a matter of policy, it is at the present moment of far more importance that girls should not be overstrained than that they should prove themselves equal to young men in the class lists. For my own part, I believe that, with reasonable precautions against over-pressure, and with due provision for bodily exercise, the higher education of women would ipso facto silence the voice of medical opposition. But I am equally persuaded that this can never be the case until it becomes a matter of general recognition among those to whom such education is intrusted, that no girl should ever be allowed to work more than eight hours a day as a maximum; that even this will in a large proportional number of cases be found to prove excessive; that without abundant exercise higher education