thoughts. They are more unhappy than men, as I have said before, and I believe it is mainly because they are worse educated. I know the instruction in the best schools for girls in the United States, and to what is it directed? To two ends, to be “good,” and to shine in society. What they should be taught is to understand the hygiene of their own bodies, to take care of their own money, to govern their decisions by justice and reason and not by impulse, to occupy their thoughts with facts and not with fiction, and, more than all, to be independent in thought and deed, and not to allow either society or sentimentality to cast the final vote in the direction of their actions.
Such doctrine may sound heretical; so I hasten to bring to its support a reputable endorser in the person of a clergyman of the Church of England, that writer who so charmingly combines the best of humor with the best of sense, the Rev. Sydney Smith. I take it from his essay on “Female Education,” an essay that ought to be read and pondered by every woman in the land, the whole burden and spirit of which is expressed in the following most pregnant sentence,—“The happiness of woman will be increased in proportion as education gives to her the habit and the means of drawing her resources from herself.”
How much better this than the following insufferable twaddle of Thomas de Quincey: “It is more in harmony with the retiring graces of their sexual character that they should practice a general rule of submission to
the traditional belief of their own separate Church, even when that belief has long been notoriously challenged as erroneous”? He is in earnest, too; and the late Poet Laureate in “In Memoriam” said nearly the same. Blind leaders of the blind! who think that falsehood and ignorance are going to point the way to light and truth.
The fact is, the moral side of woman has been educated, and thus educated, out of all proportion to her other faculties. What is not “very stuff of the conscience” makes little or no impression on her. The Good, the Fit, the Conventional are for her the True; which is a grievous error, and retards her real progress.
Education is not only the foundation for happiness; it should and it can be made a pleasure in itself. This will sound strange to those who are principally familiar with such institutions of education as those of the Mr. Squeers or Dr. Blimber type. But the schoolmaster has himself been to school, and after flogging children for several thousand years, and thereby developing a healthy hatred of books which it is a wonder did not hurl the race back into barbarism, he has learned from Froebel and Pestalozzi and others that it is actually possible for a sane mind to study with pleasure if the chance is offered. Indeed, a learned writer who has many admirers in this country, Mr. Herbert Spencer, is able to say,—“The usual test of political legislation—its tendency to promote happiness—is beginning to be the test of legislation for the school and
the nursery;” and elsewhere,—“As a final test by which to judge any plan of culture should come the question,—Does it create a pleasurable sensation in the pupil?”
This is good counsel; but, like many good things, it is also old. Two thousand years ago or so Plato wrote,—“In education, direct boys to what amuses their minds.”
Security, liberty, and the means of knowledge,—these, therefore, are the conditions of happiness which every government should, and all in some measure do, offer the individual. For them, he is entirely dependent on others. In whatever delusion to the contrary his ignorance or his arrogance may plunge him, he can obtain these inestimable benefits in no other way than through the social organization, and he cannot therefore escape his liability for them. If he denies it or refuses it, the consequences will be as inevitable as they will be disastrous. He who wisely consults the conditions which determine his own happiness will not seek in isolation or self-sufficiency these elements, which can alone be obtained through the co-operation of his fellow-man.