Page:Thirty years' progress in female education.djvu/8

4 in favour of some beneficial change have been at work, sapping and undermining the obstacles which oppose it, but with little apparent progress, and that at last the barrier gives way, and the stream flows on with a rapidity which excites astonishment. I do not know how far the way may have been secretly prepared for the advance in the education of girls and women which our generation is witnessing, and how much may be simply due to the resolute and skilful and persevering efforts of the workers in this cause. But these labours have found a propitious time, and have had quicker and more abundant results than sober anticipation would have expected. A generation, I believe, commonly means thirty years; and our College was established just thirty-one years ago. In looking back to its commencement, therefore, we are surveying a generation's progress; and we are justified in taking the establishment of Queen's College as the beginning of an epoch. The scheme of the College itself, the Lectures in which that scheme was expounded, and the actual teaching begun in the year 1848, presented to the public mind of this country an ideal of female education which was recognised as new and bold. Founded by some Professors of King's College and other like-minded men, who accepted Mr. Maurice as their leader and the exponent of their common aims, Queen's College was a living assertion of the claim of women to share to the full in the educational interests and advantages of the other sex. It is this claim which has continued to be asserted with so much success in the years that have followed. I need not say that there was nothing revolutionary in the manner in which the claim was affirmed by Professor Maurice and his colleagues; they were men of outspoken loyalty to the Church and the State, and rejoiced to be allowed to put their new College under the auspices of the Queen and of the Bishop of London—names which still honour our prospectus. But a College for women, seeking to stand side by side with King's College, and offering instruction of the same class, was far in advance of anything that had been done or even projected in that day.

It is a well-known saying of one of the noblest Frenchmen of our age, that he came to England from time to time, in order that he might take a bath of freedom. Whoever desires to take a bath of high aims and aspirations should go