site,--and when the pendulum
has reached one end of the arc, it must of necessity swing back to
the other. In all social revolutions the moderate and reasonable
concessions which might have appeased the discontent in its
incipiency are gladly tendered much too late in the contest, when the
insurgents stung by injustice and conscious of their grievances,
refuse all temperate compromise, and run riot. This woman's-rights
and woman's-suffrage abomination is no suddenly concocted social
bottle of yeast: it has been fermenting for ages, and, having finally
blown out the cork, is rapidly leavening the mass of female
malcontents."

"But, Uncle Peyton, you surely discriminate between a few noisy
ambitious sciolists who mistake lyceum notoriety for renown, and the
noble band of delicate, refined women whose brilliant attainments in
the republic of letters are surpassed only by their beautiful
devotion to God, family, and home? Fancy Mrs. Somerville demanding a
seat in Parliament, or Miss Herschel elbowing her way to the
hustings! Whose domestic record is more lovely in its pure
womanliness than Hannah More's, or Miss Mitford's, or Mrs.
Browning's? who wears deathless laurels more modestly than Rosa
Bonheur? It seems to me, sir, that it is not so much the amount as
the quality of the learning that just now ought to engage attention.
I see that one of the ablest and strongest thinkers of the day has
handled this matter in a masterly way, and with your permission I
should like to read a passage: 'In these times the educational tree
seems to me to have its roots in the air, its leaves and flowers in
the ground; and I confess I should very much like to turn it upside
down, so that its roots might be solidly embedded among the facts of
Nature, and draw thence a sound nutriment for the foliage and fruit
of literature and of art. No educational system can have a claim to
permanence, unless it recognizes the truth that education has two
great ends, to which everything else must be subordinated. One of
these is to increase knowledge; the other is to develop the love of
right and the hatred of wrong. At present, education is almost
entirely devoted to the cultivation of the power of expression, and
of the sense of literary beauty. The matter of having anything to say
beyond a hash of other people's opinions, or of possessing any
criterion of beauty, so that we may distinguish between the God-like
and the devilish, is left aside as of no