Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/415

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MODERN OVER-EDUCATION.
401

as to foster, not to suppress, any gift for art, literature, learning, or goodness with which woman may be endowed." Then, I say, give her the apple, and see what comes of it. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the result will be that which is so philosophically as well as so poetically portrayed by the Laureate:

"The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free.

******
"Then let her make herself her own
To give or keep, to live and learn to be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
For woman is not undeveloped man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.

"Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care.
Nor lose the child-like in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.

******
"Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:
Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:
Then springs the crowning race of human kind.
May these things be!"

Nineteenth Century.

MODERN OVER-EDUCATION.

THE appeal made by Professor Jowett, in the columns of the "Times," for state aid to provincial colleges established to promote "higher education," naturally raises the question how high education for the bulk of mankind ought to go. The world has heard something too much of the subject of late years, and the theme has been worn rather threadbare. Every lecturer in want of a topic, every Radical member of Parliament, bound to deliver an address to his constituents, and having exhausted his wrath against the House of Lords and the landed interest and his ideas on the Irish question, finds an unfailing resource in discoursing on education, in which he may deliver himself of platitudes ad libitum, and raise an approving cheer by informing his audience for the fiftieth time that "knowledge is power." It has ever been a boon to the Socialists and other democrats, who have discovered in their scheme of free education a convenient means of drawing upon the income of one class for the benefit of another. School