AN obvious rejoinder to the foregoing suggestions will at once present itself. It will be said that professions and business may be all very well—may indeed be best—for single women, but that sooner or later the great majority marry, and any plan of life which fails to recognise this contingency is unpractical and absurd. This is most true. We have to deal with facts; and it is a most important, though not the sole question, How would a higher education and professional training act upon family life? Home duties fall to the lot of almost every woman, and nothing which tends to incapacitate for the performance of them ought to be encouraged. Let us ask, then, what are the home duties of women as such, and what are the qualifications required for their discharge? And here we must remember that the claims involved in the conjugal and parental and filial relations are not special to women. They are not, indeed, to be disregarded in considering the bearing of a scheme of education; but in the discussion of the home duties of women as such, it is convenient to treat separately those which are not shared by men.

THE word Remarks is here especially applicable, because the subject of this tract is far too wide to admit of being reduced to system. Not in our day, nor perhaps in any future day, can the sum-total of the capacities and duties of a human being be known; for the very word progressive, now so generally applied to humanity, means an amount of change which must in time result in knowledge and activity beyond calculation at any given period. With regard to men, this is never denied; the philosopher looks forward to indefinite perfection of the race—to science of which ours is but a faint foreshadowing—to social arrangements whose very germs are now present but in the minds of a few—and to ages when the facilities for gaining knowledge will be such as to leave time and power for undreamt-of researches; and this anticipation of future progress is no feeling merely of the present day, nor is it confined to philosophy and social science alone; even some of the most energetic of the Reformers felt that in relation to the Scriptures and to this world they had not fathomed the whole counsel of God, whilst in all Christian teaching the ideal of man consists in an unresting aspiration, whose complete satisfaction not even eternity can give.

WHETHER it is owing to the prevailing confusion of ideas as to the objects of female education, or to whatever cause it may be attributed, there can be little doubt that the thing itself is held in slight esteem. No one indeed would go so far as to say that it is not worth while to educate girls at all. Some education is held to be indispensable, but how much is an open question; and the general indifference operates in the way of continually postponing it to other claims, and, above all, in shortening the time allotted to systematic instruction and discipline. Parents are ready to make sacrifices to secure a tolerably good and complete education for their sons; they do not consider it necessary to do the same for their daughters. Or perhaps it would be putting it more fairly to say, that a very brief and attenuated course of instruction, beginning late and ending early, is believed to constitute a good and complete education for a woman.

It is usually assumed that when a boy's school education has once begun, which it does at a very early age, it is to go on steadily till he is a man.