possess—onward to the domes and arches of Cordova where the sons of Arabia garner up the grain that the natives of Europe, purblind, would trample in the mire—onward to Tudor England where men breathe once more, raising their heads above the dark waters of repression and of ignorance that have stagnated heavy, thick, through so many weary centuries, and there is born into the world a new life, a new literature, a new humanity—aye and onward to our own time, when Science yielding at last to the importunity of man lets slowly fall the veil and discloses those charms so long and so jealously guarded—yes ever onward, sometimes over smooth and fruitful plain where the way is easy, and sometimes over scarped rock and through tangled briar where advance seems almost impossible, but ever onward, now with bright blaze illumining the firmament and anon with flicker feeble to the very verge of extinction, but still onward and ever onward that sacred lamp of learning is borne aloft by an eager band of votaries, a band of votaries who absorbed in their own passion pay no heed to the world about them, and for whom indeed surrounding events, thrones that totter, dynasties that dissolve, and republics that crumble away have no further interest than this, that they add yet another page to the studies of the future. Of that band you are now members.
Much has of late been written and spoken about certain of your social customs, and it has been urged that the higher education cannot be said to have borne fruit SO long as they exist. To my thinking however reform must in such matters come from within rather than from without; you must turn for guidance to the enlightened among your own country-men. But still there is one point on which I feel too strongly to remain altogether silent. How long do you intend your womankind to remain in ignorance? How long is to be before the education given you on such favourable terms filters through to them? Some little improvement has been effected during the last few years, but till female education ceases to be the exception and becomes the rule the reproach will not depart from you. Woman has occupied many positions in the world. In savage tribes merely an ill-used animal, in Greece a domestic drudge, in the purer days of chivalry an idealized being placed on a pedestal so high that she breathed a different atmosphere from that of the every-day world, in modern Western civilization a highly cultivated product rivalling man in the receptive faculty but still far 32
