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for opposition to the employment of females in the higher positions of teaching. Women are good enough for inferior service about a boys' grammar-school, it seems, but they are not capable of superintending it. They may be, and are, teachers in all the classes in such schools, even to the highest; but when the question arises whether a woman, perfectly competent, shall be superintendent of all the classes—for a principal is little more—the controllers say no. If this action is influenced by a belief that women cannot control a school of boys, we hope that the experience in the case of Mrs. McManus will dispel the illusion, and the public can afford to await the result of the trial. But if it is caused by a regard to tradition or precedent, or because there never has yet been an instance of a woman being a principal of a boys' grammar school before this case of Mrs. McManus, we hope that the controllers will soon see the error of their course. The complaints from the sections are to the effect that it is very difficult to get a competent male teacher to remain principal of a boys' grammar-school for any length of time. The salary attached to that position is inadequate, according to the increased cost of living of the times. Gentlemen who are competent to act as principals of the public schools find that they can make more money by establishing private schools; and hence they are uneasy and dissatisfied while in the public service. A woman able to take charge of a boys' grammar-school will be paid a more liberal salary (such is the injustice of our social system in relation to female labor) in that position than in any other connected with education that she can command, and she will therefore be likely to be better satisfied with the duties and to perform them more properly. That such advantage ought to be held out to ladies competent to be teachers of the highest grade, we firmly believe. The field of female avocations should be extended in every legitimate direction; and it seems to us, unless some reason can be given for the exception, which has not yet been presented in the case of Mrs. McManus, that the principalships of the boys' grammar-schools ought to be accessible to ladies of the proper character and qualification, without the imputation that by reason of their sex they must necessarily be unfitted for such duties.

In preparing themselves for the medical profession, for which the most conservative people now admit that women are peculiarly adapted, students have encountered years of opposition, ridicule and persecution. After a college for women was established in Philadelphia,* there was another long struggle before their right to attend the clinics in the hospitals was accorded. The faculty and students alike protested against the admission of women into mixed classes; but as there was no provision to give them the clinics alone, a protest against mixed classes was a protest against such advantages to women altogether. One would have supposed the men might have left the delicacy of the question to the decision of the women themselves. But in this struggle for education men have always been more concerned about the loss of modesty than the acquirement of knowledge and wisdom. From the opinions usually expressed by these self-constituted guardians of the feminine character, we might be led to infer that the virtues of women were not a part of the essential elements of their organization, but a sort of temporary scaffolding, erected by society to shield a naturally weak structure that any wind could readily demolish.