Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/76

72 impotent." And it was Wilhelm von Humboldt who wrote of "the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." If women are to develop humanly, they must not be arbitrarily cut off from the inspirations and the rewards that stimulate the growth of human mind and character.

A discussion of this general nature seemed necessary, because it was felt that prejudice against remunerating women teachers equally with men was mere prejudice based on a failure to grasp the wide bearing of the forces at work in the natural and historic evolution of women. We have still to consider the fact that there will always be some women in the profession of teaching who no longer look forward to marriage, though the terminus ad quem of this hope is nowadays very problematical, and who have no dependents whatever. This will be true, even after women have become large factors in all the professions, in most of which they already are represented, and after they have invented some new ones. But their number will not be very much greater than that of the single men in like circumstances unless women preponderate immeasurably in the population. If there were an injustice in giving them the full return for their labor, it would yet be less than the sum total of injustice of the old system. Moreover, dare we not hope, with the special penchant of women for charity and philanthropy, with the noble roll of "old maids" who are milestones in the progress of civilization, Frances Willard, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Jane Addams, that the surplus energy earned will go for the improvement of society? Society needs the development of all its latent energies for its own purification and advance. Who dares, unless he was present when the foundations of the earth were laid, brand woman's energies as inferior because proceeding from a woman, and say to her, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further"?