or who are otherwise getting the higher
education in a few private schools. "Ye are our epistle, known and read
of all men," and read of all women too, with their still keener eyes.

There is a very real danger in our High Schools that the intellectual
side of education may be overestimated and overpressed, not by
mistresses, but by yourselves; and that the natural, human, domestic,
and family elements in it may be undervalued. What are you yourselves at
home, in society, with parents, brothers, sisters, children, friends,
schoolfellows, servants? Is the better education, that you are
undoubtedly getting, widening your sympathies, opening your heart and
mind to all the educational influences which do not consist in books or
in work? Is it giving you greater delicacy of touch? Is it opening new
channels for influences, streaming in on you or streaming out from you?
Your daily life may become a higher education, and is so to the truly
noble-minded and well-educated girl or woman. Do not regard as
interruptions, and as teasing, the calls of household, the duties to
parents, visitors, children, and the rest; it is part of the education
of life to fulfil all these duties well, delightfully, brilliantly,
joyously, enthusiastically; these things are not interruptions to life,
they are life itself. There was a pitiful magazine article written the
other day by some lady complaining that social duties, the having to see
her friends, her cook, her gardener, her dress-maker, etc., prevented
her from reading Herbert Spencer, and developing her small fragment of
soul. Social duties, rightly done, are one of the developments of soul.
Let it be seen that you girls who can enjoy your literature, and your
history, and your music, and your drawing with keen appreciation are not
made thereby selfish or unsociable; but that you are more delightful
creatures than those who have no such independent resources and joys. A
girl who gets her certificate or prize and is cross or dull at home,
and does not think it worth while to be kind and agreeable to a young
brother or an old nurse, to every creature in her household down to the
cat and the canary, is a traitor to the cause of higher education.

Again, it has been observed that the practical and artistic elements in
school education have been, in general, more thoroughly developed of
late years since they were put into a secondary place. This is as it
should be. Such subjects as music, drawing