Page:Thirty years' progress in female education.djvu/19

15 Examination, which has been open under another name to women for some years, may be living in London, and prepared to begin studying at once for the B.A. degree. But it is more probable that we shall not find for a year or two amongst those who attend the Lectures of our Higher Course any who are qualified by previous matriculation to seek the first degree. Whilst we shall gladly receive any who may come on to us from such schools as those to which I have referred, we look chiefly to the retaining of those who are now our pupils.

It has been the disappointing experience of Queen's College from the first that the majority of its pupils have left the College, or have ceased to be more than occasional attendants at its Lectures, before they have even passed through our Four Years' course. At seventeen or eighteen years of age, at the end perhaps of their second junior or even their first junior year, they have been taken away from study, to go into society or to be companions to their parents at home. You know what a social custom of this kind is, how imperious, how obstinate, how utterly contemptuous of argument! It seems almost hopeless to attempt to make any impression upon it. But the movement of the time is with us, and that may give us courage. The change must have small beginnings and work its way gradually. And the change has certainly begun. In one household after another it has been felt, apart from the necessity of learning thoroughly in order to be teachers of others, that the interest and value of an advanced education were worth the sacrifices that might have to be made for it. What chiefly impresses my own mind is, the greatly superior power of apprehension and insight which comes with advancing years and enlarged experience and more cultivated intellectual faculties. A girl who discontinues regular study at seventeen or eighteen has not yet used her best opportunities. Look at the ordinary career of a young man: is it not universally understood that his college time has a much higher quality, as a period of study, than any part of his school time? Experience shows that, even if the female nature be somewhat more early in maturing than the male, the young woman has no more than the young man reached her most effective time for regular study before she is eighteen. One could not wish that the real charities of home should suffer,