Then, at last, will our whole bloodless, heartless, soulless public-school system be brought before the bar of intelligent womanhood, and the sense or nonsense, the kindness or cruelty, of the regulations of the present school committees criticised by those whom God made the natural guardians and teachers of children. I can understand the ignoring of women by men in almost everything else, but how it is possible that they have not seen the absolute necessity of placing them on school committees, I cannot conceive.[1] The consequence is a routine so dry, mechanical, and one-sided, that it has got either to be wholly reformed or given up; for better no national education at all, than one which disposes us to be only a race of cheating traders. The feminine board of education will also have to decide the scarcely less important question of how much longer girls are to be kept out of the universities, and, in case they ought to be admitted, in what manner and by what means the sex had best attempt to bring it about. For myself, I think that the offer by women of half a million of dollars to either Harvard, Yale, Michigan, or Cornell, as the price of our admission, should precede all appeal, argument, or protest in the matter. I cannot echo the lofty tone of those who claim that women have a "right" to a university education, and that men have no "right" to keep them out of it. I really hope I shall live to see the day when the confusion of the American mind on the subject of "right"—one of the many baleful gifts of false France—is cleared up. How any one can have a right to a thing that he or she has never possessed, I cannot imagine. I can maintain that a woman has a natural right to her life or her honour, because these are her original possessions from her Maker. So, too, a native-born, white American citizen has a right to vote, because it is an inheritance from his father, upon which he legally enters when he is twenty-one years of age. But no other person has a "natural
- ↑ Since writing the above I have heard that in Worcester, Mass., a lady was to be appointed a member of the School Committee. The world moves.
