Page:Thirty years' progress in female education.djvu/14

10 In Girton College, as a home of academical study, and in these London University Degrees, the tide of which we have been noticing the advance has reached high-water mark. A girl has now the chance of attending a good public School, of sharing Collegiate life and training, and of winning a University Degree—just as if she were a boy.

I have intimated already that this attainment of equality with the other sex, is only the form which circumstances have imposed upon the great effort of the last thirty years, and does not represent the ultimate desire in the hearts of those who have taken part in it. It must be considered a distinct advantage, indeed, that the two sexes should have such a fellowship of studies and knowledge as may enrich and exalt the communion between them. It is surely an injury and not a gain to the companionship of domestic and conjugal life, that the woman should be unable to enter fully into the intellectual interests of the man. And for this reason it might be rightly desired that girls and boys, young women and young men, should have similar opportunities of education. But what is most important is, that either sex should have the teaching and the training which will do the most for it, and bring it forward to its highest possible life. It would be an unworthy aim, that we should be struggling to get for a girl just what a boy has, without considering whether it is good in itself, and good for her, or not. Such an aim we of Queen's College decisively repudiate. If we prescribe to our girls that they shall learn Latin as well as French or German or Italian, it is not simply because boys learn it, but because we are convinced that the learning of Latin is a most desirable element in a girl's education. If we are inviting those who may come to us to look forward to the Examinations of the University of London, we have felt bound to assure ourselves that it will be a good thing for them to prepare for these Examinations. And this is, on the whole, our conviction. We desire to attach the working system of the College to the successive Examinations of the University of London. But we should not like to be supposed to put a blind faith in Examinations.

There are two principal features of the general educational movement of the last twenty or thirty years which have