Page:The Education and Employment of Women.djvu/7

7 which it saddens one to hear. The reports of Bethlehem Hospital and other lunatic asylums prove that not a few poor governesses find their way thither. Some are found in Penitentiaries among the fallen. Inquiry shows that insufficient food while out of situations, added to the to the mental trials of an unloved and isolated being, have driven some of these governesses to opium or to strong drink, until, penniless and degraded they have sought a refuge among penitents where there was nothing to pay. "Her funds are exhausted, and she earnestly seeks a re-engagement;" words such as these, taken from an advertisement in the Times, headed—"To the benevolent," are no unfrequent symptom of a deep and wide distress. Some determined women there are who have devoted to self-culture as much of their pittance as could be spared from the barest needs of life, and of whom it is known that, night after night when they went to bed, they have tied a band round their waist to keep down the gnawings of hunger. One such I know who has risen by her force of character to almost as high a place as it is at present possible for a woman to occupy in the educational world, but who is not yet free from sufferings entailed by years of mental anxiety and bodily privations. An insufficiency of the necessaries of life is not the bitterest complaint of many of these sufferers, who by their lives protest that man does not live by bread alone. "Worse than bodily privations or pains" (I quote the words of one of them) "are these aches and pangs of ignorance, this unquenched thirst for knowledge, these unassisted and disappointed efforts to obtain it, this sight of bread enough and to spare, but locked away from us, this depressing sense of miserable a waste of powers bestowed on us by God, and which we know we could have used for the lessening of evil and the increase of the happiness of our fellow-creatures."

The desire for education which is widely felt by English women, and which has begun to find its expression in many