“I am very glad indeed about the Princess. It is the best of all the many kind things she has done. How did you get at her?
“I will write myself to Mr. Novelli, and am going on Tuesday to Sir Joseph Whitworth’s, and will see if I can move him to help us! Give my love to Miss Buss. She will ‘see the fruit of her doings’ yet; and she does not know how much her patient endurance has strengthened the hands of the many (of whom she may never hear) who are wearied and ready to lose heart in their labours. I can speak of what her example is to myself.”
CHAPTER III.
“THE SISTERS OF THE BOYS.”
“No man will give his son a stone if he asks for bread; but thousands of men have given their daughters diamonds when they asked for books, and coiled serpents of vanity and dissipation round their necks when they asked for wholesome food and beneficent employment.”—F. P. Cobbe.
The great event of the year 1871—from the educational point of view—was the meeting of the Society of Arts, at which Mrs. William Grey read her able paper on Secondary Education for Girls, in which was contained the germ of the Women’s National Education Union, and the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company. The chair was taken by the Rev. William Rogers, whose great school for boys in Cowper Street was just completed, and the audience included most of the distinguished leaders in educational movements.
Mrs. Grey took up the question of higher education for women in all its bearings, and, recognizing the needs which had to be met, proposed the formation of “an Educational League,” to embrace all who were actively interested in the question, and having for its object—
“to carry what might be characterized as the Educational Charter of Women—first, the equal right of women to the education considered best for human beings; second, the equal right of women to a share in the existing educational endowments of the country, and to be considered, not less than boys, in the creation of any new endowments; third, the registration of teachers, with such other measures as may raise teaching as a profession no less honourable and honoured for women than it is for men.”
The discussion following this paper will always retain historic value, because, as both sides had free scope, it represents the exact estimate of women which prevailed at that period. For the women of the twentieth century—in the serene enjoyment of the results of the work of the nineteenth century—it will have an interest of which wonder will form no small part. The women of 1871, as they listened, had long since ceased to wonder, but they had other feelings which, happily for the readers of 1971, will also have acquired the historic value which attaches to all relics of a far-away past.
It was when presiding at this meeting that Mr. Rogers made the speech, of which every one heard so much during the next two years, a speech that showed how he also had yet to learn from experience the difference between efforts for boys’ and efforts for girls’ schools.