There is something to remember: cultivate sympathy, gentleness, forgiveness, purity, truth, love: and then, though you may have no other gifts, "until you're among the angels, you cannot be commonplace."
And here I might conclude. But I should not satisfy myself or you, if I did so without paying my tribute of genuine commendation to the High School, and of hearty respect for the Head-mistress and her staff of teachers. Clifton owes Miss Woods a great debt for the tone of high-mindedness and loyalty, for the moral and intellectual stamp that she has set on the School. She has won, as we all know, the sincere respect and attachment of her mistresses and her old pupils; and the older and wiser you grow the more you all will learn to honour and love her. And you will please her best by thorough loyalty to the highest aims of the School which she puts before you by her words and by her example.
[1] An Address given at the High School, Clifton, Oct. 25, 1887.
II.
HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.[2]
It is a real pleasure to find myself in Bath on an educational mission. I have ancestral and personal educational connections with Bath of very old standing. My father was curate of St. Michael's before I was born; my grandfather and uncle were in succession head-masters of the Grammar School here, fine scholars both, of the old school. My first visit to Bath was when I was nine years old, and on that occasion I had my first real stand-up fight with a small Bath Grammar School boy. I think that if the old house is still standing I could find the place where we fought, and where a master brutally interrupted us with a walking-stick. Since those days, my relations with Bath have been rare, but peaceful; unless, indeed, the honourable competition between Clifton College and its brilliant daughter, Bath College, may be regarded as a ceaseless but a friendly combat between their two head-masters whom you see so peaceably side by side.
I propose, first, to say a few words about the condition of schools twenty years ago, before the present impulse towards the higher education of women gave us High Schools and Colleges at the Universities, and other educational movements. There is a most interesting chapter in the report of the Endowed Schools Commission of 1868 on girls' schools, and some valuable evidence collected by the Assistant Commissioners. It is not ancient history yet, and therein lies its great value to us. It shows us the evils from which we are only now escaping in our High Schools: evils which still prevail to a formidable extent in a large section of girls' education, and from which I can scarcely imagine Bath is wholly free.
The report speaks of the general indifference of parents to the education of their girls in our whole upper and middle class, both absolutely and relatively to that of their boys. That indifference in part remains. There was a strong prejudice that girls could not learn the same subjects as boys, and that even if they could, such an education was useless and even injurious. That prejudice still survives, in face of facts.