in every true woman's heart, warded
off this danger. As one remarked, "I have a great deal of
the milk of human kindness in my nature, but its streams
flow toward the roomful of children to be injured by an
incompetent teacher, rather than toward that teacher,
however needy he may be. If his claims rest on his needs
rather than his merits, let the poormaster attend to his
wants, not the superintendent. School money is not a pauper
fund." This motherliness comes in good play in school
visitation. It draws the children to the superintendent;
keeps them from being afraid of her, and hence leads them to
work naturally during her visit; thus she can obtain a true
idea of the status of the school, and know just how to
advise and direct the teacher. The same thing holds true in
regard to teachers; the majority of them are ladies, and
they will come to a lady for the solution of their doubts
and difficulties much more freely than to a gentleman. This
gives her better opportunity to "impart instruction and give
directions to inexperienced teachers." Woman's power to lift
up the teachers under her control to a higher plane, both
intellectually and morally, has been signally demonstrated
by the experience of the past four years.

In looking after the details of official work, those
tiresome minutiae so often left at "loose ends," producing
endless confusion, woman has shown great aptitude. You say,
"this is but the clean sweeping of a new broom." May be so,
in part; but in part it comes from the womanly instinct to
"look well to the ways of her household," whether that
household be the occupants of a cottage or the schools of a
county. In the work of the State Association of County
Superintendents, the ladies have well sustained their part.
When placed on the programme, they have come prepared with
carefully written papers, showing their desire to give the
Association the benefit of their best thoughts, and not put
off upon it such crudely digested ideas as may spring up at
the moment. At the last meeting at Springfield, four out of
the nine superintendents now in office were p