ker at a
disadvantage for any reason--because he was poor, not rich; black, not
white; female, not male,--that is, there has been nothing special to
women in the injustice she has suffered except its particular form.
Moreover, it was not man alone who was responsible for this injustice.
Stronger women have often imposed upon the weak--men and women--as
strong men have done. In its essence, it is a human, not a sex,
question--this of injustice.

The hesitation of this country in the earlier part of the nineteenth
century to accord to women the same educational facilities as to men
is often cited as a proof of a deliberate effort to disparage women.
But it should not be forgotten that the wisdom of universal male
education was hotly in debate. One of the ideals of radical reformers
for centuries had been to give to all the illumination of knowledge.
But to teach those who did the labor of the world, its peasants and
its serfs, was regarded by both Church and State as a folly and a
menace. It was the establishment of a pure democracy that forced the
experiment of universal free instruction in this country. It has met
with opposition at every stage, and there is to-day a Mr. Worldly
Wiseman at every corner bewailing the evils it has wrought. He must,
too, be a hopeless Candide who can look on our experiment, wonderful
and inspiring as it is, and say its results have been the best
possible.

It was entirely logical, things beings as they were, that there should
have been strong opposition to giving girls the same training in
schools as boys. That objection holds good to-day in many reflective
minds. He again must be a hopeless optimist who believes that we have
worked out the best possible system of education for women. But that
there was opposition to giving women the same educational facilities
as men was not saying that there was or ever had been a conspiracy on
foot to keep her in intellectual limbo because she was a woman. The
history of learning shows clearly enough that women have always
shared in its rise. In the great revival of the sixteenth century
they took an honorable part. "I see the robbers, hangmen, adventurers,
hostlers of to-day more learned than the doctors and preacher of my
youth," wrote Rabelais, and he added, "why, women and girls have
aspired to the heavenly manna of good learning." Whenever aspiration
has been in the air, women have responded to it as men have, and have
found, as men have found,