given and
required to take a vacation of three days every fourth week. It is
scarcely necessary to say that their sanitary condition is
exceptionally good, and that the aggregate yearly amount of work which
the owner obtains is greater than when persistent attendance and labor
was required. I have never heard of any female school, public or
private, in which any such plan has been adopted; nor is it likely
that any similar plan will be adopted so long as the community
entertain the conviction that a boy's education and a girl's education
should be the same, and that the same means the boy's. What is known
in England as the Ten-hour Act, which Mr. Mundella and Sir John
Lubbock have recently carried through Parliament, is a step in a
similar direction. It is an act providing for the special protection
of women against over-work. It does not recognize, and probably was
not intended to recognize, the periodical type of woman's
organization. It is founded on the fact, however, which law has been
so slow to acknowledge, that the male and female organization are not
identical.[35]

This is not the place for the discussion of these details, and
therefore we will not dwell upon them. Our object is rather to show
good and imperative reason why they should be discussed by others; to
show how faulty and pregnant of ill the education of American girls
has been and is, and to demonstrate the truth, that the progress and
development of the race depend upon the appropriate, and not upon the
identical education of the sexes. Little good will be done in this
direction, however, by any advice or argument, by whatever facts
supported, or by whatever authority presented, unless the women of our
country are themselves convinced of the evils that they have been
educated into, and out of which they are determined to educate their
daughters. They must breed in them the lofty spirit Wallenstein bade
his be of:--

"Leave now the puny wish, the girlish feeling,
Oh, thrust it far behind thee! Give thou proof
Thou'rt the daughter of the Mighty,--his
Who where he moves creates the wonderful.
Meet and disarm necessity by choice."

SCHILLER: _The Piccolomini_, act iii. 8.
(_Coleridge's Translation._)

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 178.

[25] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.

[26] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.

[27] Enigmas of Life. Op. cit., by W