of their grandmothers in the care of the house and family. It has always seemed to us, therefore, that their time must be in a great measure their own. What a valuable staff of assistants might they not prove in a parish, if their training had given them some feeling for and sympathy with the poor! Such a character as is depicted in the beautiful tale of Katharine Ashton has, we suspect, but few corresponding realities in the world of tradesmen's daughters. Happy would it be for themselves and others if it had more. The education that gives a smattering of learning and accomplishments which can never be of use either in teaching others or in refining their own minds, is all which seems hitherto to have been desired by this class of women. But it must be said in excuse that hardly any other education has been possible for them. The only teachers who have offered themselves were half educated persons of their own class, compelled to earn a precarious and scanty living in this manner; love and devotion, and even capacity for the work, being generally wholly wanting. We trust, however, that a better day is dawning upon this most important but long-neglected branch of education, and that ere long we may see many efforts successfully carried out in the way of improvement. The gradual advance in middle class schools is as needful amongst boys as girls, if we would look for more enlightenment and intelligent benevolence amongst our future guardians of the poor and ratepayers, who have so much power in their hands as regards the management of the class whose grievances we have been considering.
At the present time in England we are unable to find workers for the comparatively few spheres in which their help is called for. We have no source to which we can send with the certainty of obtaining a supply. In the other countries of Europe, where orders of women devoted to the care of the poor and sick have long been organized, some "mother house" is always ready to provide the help that is asked from it. And here we are induced to inquire how it is that France and Italy, where the education of women is so greatly inferior to that of our own high standard, produce women of tact, discretion, and mental powers equal to the government of communities of their own sex, and of charitable establishments of the most varied and difficult character? Such communities must be as liable to division and dissension arising from the evil tempers of human nature in one country as another, yet they exist, and have done so for centuries. In Mrs. Jameson's Communion of Labour, accounts are given of hospitals, penitentiaries, and even prisons, which are managed by women. A remarkable prison near Vienna is described, containing two hundred of the most degraded female criminals, which was under the government of twelve women, no male officials residing in the house. And there are numerous
