better educated
than the boys. They stay longer at school--sometimes twice as long. They
are more open to the purifying and elevating influences of religion.
Their brains are neither muddled away with drink and profligacy, or
narrowed by the one absorbing aim of turning a penny into five farthings.
They have a far larger share than their brothers of that best of all
practical and moral educations, that of family life. Any one who has had
experience of the families of farmers and small tradesmen, knows how
boorish the lads are, beside the intelligence, and often the refinement,
of their sisters. The same rule holds (I am told) in the manufacturing
districts. Even in the families of employers, the young ladies are, and
have been for a generation or two, far more highly cultivated than their
brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too
often injured by pleasure. The same, I believe, in spite of all that has
been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of
that class which is, by a strange irony, called 'the ruling class.' I
suspect that the average young lady already learns more worth knowing at
home than her brother does at the public school. Those, moreover, who
complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the
so-called 'marriage market,' must remember this--that the great majority
of those who will have votes will be either widows, who have long passed
all that, have had experience, bitter and wholesome, of the realities of
life, and have most of them given many pledges to the State in the form
of children; or women who, by various circumstances, have been early
withdrawn from the competition of this same marriage-market, and have
settled down into pure and honourable celibacy, with full time, and
generally full inclination, to cultivate and employ their own powers. I
know not what society those men may have lived in who are in the habit of
sneering at 'old maids.' My experience has led me to regard them with
deep respect, from the servant retired on her little savings to the
unmarried sisters of the rich and the powerful, as a class pure,
unselfish, thoughtful, useful, often experienced and able; more fit for
the franchise, when they are once awakened to their duties as citizens,
than the average men of the corresponding class. I am aware that such a
statement will be met with 'laughter, the unripe fruit of wisdom.' But
that will n