s
Ago," a true word as to social needs in England, that reminded me of
this that the Holabirds and the Penningtons and the Inglesides have
been doing, half unconsciously, led on from "next" to next, in
Z----.

Mr. Kingsley, after describing a Miss Heale, and others of her
class,--the middle class, with no high social opportunities, and
with time upon their hands, wasted often in false dreams of life and
unsatisfied expectations, "bewildering heart and brain with novels,"
for want of a nobler companionship, says this: "Till in country
villages, the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will
recollect that the farmers' and tradesmens' daughters are just as
much in want of their influence as the charity children and will
yield a far richer return for their labor, so long will England be
full of Miss Heales."

If a kindly influence and fellowship are the duty of the
aristocratic girls of England toward their "next," below, how far
more false are American girls to the spirit of their country, and
the blessed opportunities of republican sympathies and equalities,
when they try to draw invisible lines between themselves and those
whose outer station differs by but so little, and whose hearts and
minds, under the like culture with their own, crave, just as they
do, the best that human intercourse can give. Social science has
something to do, before--or at least simultaneously with--reaching
down to the depths where all the wrongs and blunders and
mismanagements of life have precipitated their foul residuum. A
master of one of our public schools, speaking of the undue culture
of the brain and imagination, in proportion to the opportunities
offered socially for living out ideas thus crudely gathered, said
that his brightest girls were the ones who in after years, impatient
of the little life gave them to satisfy the capacities and demands
aroused and developed during the brief period of school life, and
fed afterwards by their own ill-judged and ill-regulated reading,
were found fallen into lives of vice. Have our women, old or young,
who make and circumscribe the opportunities of social intercourse
and enjoyment, nothing to search out here, and help, as well, or as
soon as, to get their names put on committee lists, and manage these
public schools themselves, which educate and stimulate up to the
point of possible fierce temptation, and then have nothing more that
they can do?

It was a good thing for Desire Ledwit