AN "UGLY RUSH"!

Mr. Bull: "Not if I know it!" (See Division on the Woman's Vote Bill.)

Mrs. Nassau Senior

The appointment of Mrs. Nassau Senior by the President of the Local Government Board to inspect and report on pauper schools, and her contribution to the Third Annual Report of that Department, meet with unqualified approval:—

In the midst of that vast blue-book of seven hundred pages there is a bit of motherly writing by Mrs. Nassau Senior, which is delightful to read, and cannot fail to be of immense use. Mrs. Senior has visited pauper schools, and has traced about seven hundred girls who had been educated at pauper schools; and her brief biographies of these poor little waifs are perfect in their simplicity. She believes that the Poor Law system will, in time, come to an end through improvement in education. Mr. Punch is not so sanguine. Mendicity is eternal. But the pauper may be gradually raised to a higher level; and such an inquiry as Mrs. Senior's is likely to do great good in this way.

Mr. Punch is delighted when a lady does in this direction what no man could possibly do. The terse memoirs of these poor little pauper maids are much more pathetic than anything in modern fiction. We trace the poor children from place to place—we see them stunted, sulky, squinting, suffering from ophthalmia, the very refuse of the world. Mrs. Senior, kind and keen in her investigations, tells the Guardians of the Poor (who too often deem themselves mere guardians of the ratepayers) how they may gradually diminish this evil. Mr. Stansfeld did a wise thing when he asked her to undertake the inquiry; if the lessons of it are rightly read, her second contribution to the blue-book will have a far rosier tinge.

The treatment of the Higher Education of Women follows much the same course—from ridicule to respect. When a Women's Library was founded in New York, it is seriously suggested in 1860 that a similar institution might with advantage be established in London, with Miss Bessie Parkes, who was an active promoter of the Social Science Association, as Librarian. But when in the summer of 1862 Mlle. Emma Chenu was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Sorbonne, Punch contents himself with drawing up a burlesque list of Lady Professors for the University of Cambridge, most of them popular actresses of the time, including Marie Wilton, Patty Oliver, Lydia Thompson, etc. By way of contrast to this carnival of punning facetiousness we may note the rebuke administered in May, 1863, to the students of University College, who hissed the proposal to admit women to degrees.

Girton College

Great capital was made out of "Sweet Girl Graduates" by Du Maurier in many characteristic variations on the "Princess Ida" theme. But the movement was rapidly passing beyond the stage in which it could only be treated sentimentally or in a spirit of ridicule. Huxley was lecturing to women at South Kensington in 1870, and in 1871 the Ladies' College at Hitchin (founded in 1869), which owed its origin to the enterprise and liberality of Madame Bodichon—the friend of George Eliot and the zealous advocate of the improvement of women's position in the state—had so far justified itself as to earn Punch's commendation, under the typically frivolous heading of "The Chignon at Cambridge," a good example of inept alliteration's artless aid:—

At the examination lately held at Cambridge a number of students from the Ladies' College at Hitchin passed their "Little-go"; the first time that such undergraduates ever underwent that ordeal. It is gratifying to be enabled to add, that out of all those flowers of loveliness, not one was plucked. Bachelors of Art are likely to be made look to their laurels by these Spinsters, and Masters must work hard or they will be eclipsed by Mistresses, more completely than the Sun was the other day by the Moon. And we may expect that when such competitors of both sexes come to perform upon the classical and mathematical Tripos, a Pythoness will be first upon the former, and another young lady will dance off triumphantly Senior Wrangler.