Immediately after the legal decision had been given, the Spectator took up the question in an article “Women’s Wrongs at Edinburgh,” of which the following sentences give the gist:
“To canvass the legality of the judgment itself is alike beyond the present writer’s competency and his wish, though it may be permitted to remark that the best known names are found in the minority, and that the reasonings on the other side, while turning on a very narrow principle, are exceedingly discursive and inconsequent.
... The Senate included some staunch friends of the lady students, and about an equal number of resolute opponents, but the indifferent majority who swayed the action of the body appears to have had no aim except to hush up a troublesome affair. Their policy was to do all they could to oblige the applicants, meanwhile trusting to the chapter of accidents to escape the difficulties that might come after.”
This was shrewd and true.
Within a few days a long and exhaustive review of the position and its possibilities, from the pen of Mrs. Garrett Anderson, appeared in the Times, in the course of which the writer urged that the time was not ripe for the medical education of women in Great Britain, and that “in no way could women better serve the cause we desire to promote than by going to Paris to study medicine, and returning here as soon as might be to practise it.” “Never,” she said, “was there a case in which the truth of the adage, ‘Solvitur ambulando,’ was more likely to make itself felt.” [In the spirit of Professor Hodgson’s translation of Horace, one may say, in fact, that “the difficulty might be solved by crossing the Channel.”]
Of course S. J.-B. did not agree with her, and she wrote a detailed reply[[113]] which Jupiter supported with a leading utterance in his own name. He was not enthusiastic about women doctors at all, but in this particular difference of opinion he gave his vote for the “equally deserving, but hitherto less fortunate aspirant to the position of a legally qualified practitioner.”[[114]]
S. J.-B. knew more of the hidden springs than anyone, and she did not consider that the time had come to give in. She who had borne the brunt of so many disappointments was still full of hope. She wanted her own country to give her this thing. Above all she felt that “so long as no means of education are provided at home, only a very small number of women will ever seek admission to the profession.”
“This last consideration,” she says, “was to me conclusive.”
“I greatly admire your letter to Mrs. G. Anderson,” wrote Professor Hodgson, “and I am truly glad to see that you are not so despondent as I am. The passive power of resistance on the part of those who hold a position is terribly difficult to overcome. It is not mere inertia; that would be bad enough. Ultimate success I do not at all despair of, but individual life is short and the journey is long and arduous.”
Both Times and Spectator spoke severely of the behaviour of the University, and on September 1st an apologia appeared from the pen of the Principal. It was just the letter one might have expected from an able, urbane, scholarly gentleman; he scanned the whole history “as we do our own poetry, laying stress on the right syllables and passing lightly over a halting foot.” It would have been a fine and conclusive defence,—if Jupiter had not allowed a poor overworked medical student to answer it. The two letters represent two conflicting schools of historians, the one sweeping, picturesque, probable: the other definite, statistical, true. The former is certainly the easier to read. The correspondence is so essentially typical of many of the “disputes” S. J.-B. had with others in the course of her life that it is given in full in the appendix.[[115]]