scholars and lawyers; and when later on in her home there is
a sudden sickness or accident, and the life or death of those nearest to
her hangs upon skill and knowledge and a trained fortitude in emergency,
she must needs send in all haste for a hired woman to fill the place
that she herself has never learned to occupy.
But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole curriculum. I am only
trying to indicate that higher education for the man is one thing, for
the woman another. Nor do I deny the fact that women have got to earn
their living. Their higher education must enable them to do that. They
cannot all marry on their graduation day. But that is no great matter.
No scheme of education that any one is likely to devise will fail in
this respect.
The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they would
fill all the better if their education were fitted to their wants.
Some few, a small minority, really and truly "have a
career,"--husbandless and childless,--in which the sacrifice is great
and the honour to them, perhaps, all the higher. And others no doubt
dream of a career in which a husband and a group of blossoming children
are carried as an appendage to a busy life at the bar or on the
platform. But all such are the mere minority, so small as to make no
difference to the general argument.
But there--I have written quite enough to make plenty of trouble except
perhaps at Cambridge University. So I return with relief to my general
study of Oxford. Viewing the situation as a whole, I am led then to the
conclusion that there must be something in the life of Oxford itself
that makes for higher learning. Smoked at by his tutor, fed in Henry
VIII's kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the student evidently
gets something not easily obtained in America. And the more I reflect
on the matter the more I am convinced that it is the sleeping in the ivy
that does it. How different it is from student life as I remember it!
When I was a student at the University of Toronto thirty years ago, I
lived,--from start to finish,--in seventeen different boarding houses.
As far as I am aware these houses have not, or not yet, been marked with
tablets. But they are still to be found in the vicinity of McCaul and
Darcy, and St. Patrick Streets. Any one who doubts the truth of what I
have to say may go and look at them.
I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. There were hundreds
of us drifting about in this
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