"It is a matter of great gratification to me to meet gentlemen who are engaged in the work of education. I feel at home among teachers, and I may say I look Dack with more satisfaction upon my work as a teacher than upon any other work I have done. It gives me a pleasant home feeling to sit among you and revive old memories.

"There is one thing to which I will venture to call your attention, and that is the great case, if I may speak as a lawyer, which is soon to be tried before the American people,—the case of Brains vs. Brick and Mortar. That, in my judgment, is to be a notable trial, and unless the cause is fully argued and rightly decided we shall have no end of trouble in our educational work. To insure its final and rightful settlement the friends of our schools should unite to force the question to a hearing, and should go to the very bottom of the controversy. It has long been my opinion that we are all educated, whether children, men, or women, far more by personal influence than by books and the apparatus of schools. If I could be taken back into boyhood to-day, and had all the libraries and apparatus of a university with ordinary routine professors offered me on the one hand, and on the other a great, luminous, rich-souled man, such as Dr. Hopkins was twenty years ago, in a tent in the woods alone, I should say give me Dr. Hopkins for my college course rather than any university with only routine professors. The privilege of sitting down before a great, clear-headed, large-hearted man, and breathing the atmosphere of his life, and being drawn up to him and lifted up by him and learning his methods of thinking and living, is in itself an enormous educating power.

"And so in our schools let us put less money in great school-houses and more in the salaries of teachers. Smaller schools and more teachers, less machinery and more personal influence will bring forth fruits higher and better than any we have yet seen."

THE NECESSITY OF EDUCATION FOR THE WORKING

WOMAN.

BY EVELYN DARLING, YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO.

By education I mean the progressive, symmetrical development of the individual, and by the working-woman every woman who by her own labor earns her own living. Work is endless, and therefore the worker should be so developed that faith and hope would be as endless. I believe that all will admit that, as a whole, the work of the world is dignified and holy. Thus, at the beginning, we have a high standpoint from which to survey the practical divisions and gradations of labor among all those who perform it.

All persons, men and women, need to reach a certain plane of intelligence before they can do work with satisfaction to themselves or safety to others. This probably applies with especial force to woman at present, because, on account of her position from ancient times until now, she has been inclined to act without sufficient previous thought. The use of powers without their education has been, and will be, most dangerous. The intuitions of woman may still be trusted, and yet her wise judgment demanded and provided for. Because as the mother is more widely intelligent, so may the unconscious nature of the daughter be more trustworthy. The mother has talent for excellence of life; the daughter may have genius for excellence of life.

Probably better and wiser work will not be done in the world, until wider and deeper thinking is prevalent, enabling people to act from more knowledge and therefore with more enlightened consciences And how can a vacant mind think?

A company of people hear a lecture. Each person gets from it light and help in proportion to his mental receptive ability. To one it is food and new strength; to another, perhaps only a succession of sounds that induce sleep. Until woman is sufficiently educated to see what is in the work she has to do, what it contains of power to help herself and those for whom it is done, she will not reach her highest value.

An appreciation of the dignity and worth of honest and necessary labor is, considered with respect to nations, a product of Christian civilization. With respect to individuals, my own observation has

been, that the person most reliable for helpfulness, whether called upon to consider deep, mental questions, or to do the work of a household from cellar to garret, is nearly always the person most thoroughly educated. Many persons of extensive experience with whom I have talked have given me the same testimony. Considering working. women as a whole, they do not so much lack energy and activity, as knowledge which shall direct their energy and make their activity wise. Scientists say that the moral faculties are the last to be unfolded; they represent the flowering of humanity.

The individual, then, must be led out in every direction before he can have sufficient data to form, concerning his life and its duties, the best judgments. Just as a great man could not rise up, state his fine premises and make his grand deductions, unless the long and patient inductions of generations before him had made it possible; so in the individual, the best activity cannot be secured without the long and patient preparation of study and thought.

Some aggressive women have brought the ridicule of men upon themselves and often upon their cause, by advocating their theories, regardless of reason or facts. Utter nonsense, with no assumption of knowledge or reason, is said to be effective in gaining the approval of some men; but when the acknowledged object is to convince the reason, men cannot be blamed for demanding that a woman should speak from facts, logically considered.

We sometimes hear that education is getting to be much valued among us for its own sake; but this is likely to be the view of those who have spent their lives among people of far more than average culture. When their employments lead them out among the ordinary masses that make up society, they are surprised to find how little education is really valued.

It often happens, in this country especially, that young women suddenly find themselves thrown upon their own resources for a livelihood. Now the great reason why they are so restricted in the kinds of work they can do is found in the faulty education they have received. If the few things they can do fail, they have no power to adapt themselves to any thing else. Behind their training was always the idea that they needed, for such lives as theirs would be, only certain things, mainly drawing-room accomplishments and a few household qualifications; and in these latter, alas, no sound knowledge of any branch of learning, not even of physiology, was deemed necessary. In teaching they do but the poorest work, for their untrained minds cannot be relied upon to find out what they do not know. A friend told me of a gentleman teacher who addressed one of his classes thus: "You

may provide yourselves with French books; I expect to begin the study tomorrow." Pupils of much advancement very soon know the mental resources of a teacher. If, at any point, her knowledge is not equal to their demands, they know well whether or not she is able to find out what she does not at the moment know.

I once knew a young woman who said, when asked how she expected to get on in the world without some knowledge of arithmetic, “Oh, my husband will keep all my accounts for me." At the time she had no particular husband in prospect, and only spoke from what she considered general principles. To be sure, many think that women of very inferior acquirements will do well enough to begin the mental training of children; but one great difference which a thoughtful observer will see between the educated and uneducated teacher is in just this matter of teaching children. The educated person, alone, will realize how important are beginnings, and what years of dissatisfied striving the student may be saved by competent teachers. In all the schools I have known, it is the children taught by well educated teachers who have done the best work, and who have been just as free and happy in their work as in their play. Every earnest stu dent of humanity knows how hard it is to influence average men and women to change even the least of their habits. How surely all our hope lies in the young! We cannot begin too early to surround our children with beneficent influences.

The masses are not sufficiently enlightened to demand the best work from their teachers. They erect costly school-buildings and then save (?) the money out of the salaries of those who work for them. But the excellence of a few educators must be relied on to create a demand for more. In this case the supply must create the demand. In every department of activity, it has always been the best work which has impressed people, which has lived most triumphantly in their hearts and lives. What really good thinking or living would be likely to come from the girl who thought it unnecessary to study arithmetic, because her husband would keep her accounts for her? Is it not the best thing for any human being, to give him or her the best education possible under the circumstances, entirely irrespective of sex or any outward condition? It may be said that a servant-girl can wash, iron, sweep, and perhaps cook as well without education. as with it. I deny emphatically that she can cook as well; but grant it all to be true, she can not live her own life as well, and certainly she is an unsafe assistant in the care of children.

Not long ago, a Swedish girl told me that when she came to this country her sleeping-room was so low that at every hard rain the

Her mistress told

water would be several inches deep on the floor. her that if the police inquired about her sleeping-room, to tell them that she slept quite above the ground. The girl only knew that it was uncomfortable, but had no knowledge whatever of the physical and mental effect upon herself, or in the years to come upon her children; and this girl was naturally brighterthan the average of her class. The welfare of the family is too much in the hands of girls like this, safely to leave them ignorant. They know almost nothing of the value of proper food, warmth, and pure air to the human frame. Because of ignorance, they have no resources peculiarly their own, and of which nothing can rob them. Their work means little but mere drudgery which they must finish as soon as possible.

I lately asked a thriving lawyer, in one of our large cities, what he thought of the obligation to educate the so-called laboring classes. He assured me that he thought if the masses were insured a better education there would be no one to perform the manual labor. Kitchen girls, especially, would be impossible to obtain. It certainly seems clear that nothing else than more thorough and extensive education among the "higher classes" will ever remove the false bases upon which people stand, will ever set up reasonable standards of judgment. More education among all classes would make absurd and impossible the idea that, among people striving for power to do well and faithfully the work for which they were best fitted, one person was, intrinsically, more to be honored than another. In every case, the most thoroughly cultured people I have known were quite willing to do any necessary work, with no feeling, however remote, of being degraded; and all really excellent servants in the employ of such people are generally abundantly honored.

I

A lady once said to me, "I rarely look at a common person. can't tell one from another when I do. Their faces seem all alike to me." She said this as we met some day-laborers in the street, going home from their work. Truly, one who can make such a remark has "faculties which she has never used." A child born is a child of all the ages, with their people and events, that have been before him. What an ancestry! What an inheritance! Surely the only thing to do is to find out and enter upon what portion of this grand inheritance we may in our short life; and who can tell from what source an added legacy may come? Who can talk of "common people"? I cannot but think that the false standards by which people judge are largely to blame for much of the poor work and disappointed workers in the world. Many who have good talent for certain lines of work will not do that work, because it is looked down upon by a certain class. With