most modern of the learned
professions, and is more human than engineering, which is also modern.
It takes us into the homes of the poor more intimately than even the
clergyman, and it offers remedies and palliatives as well as advice.
The law is little studied by women in Australia, but in the United
States there are probably a thousand or more legal practitioners. It is
the profession that I should have chosen when I was young if it had
been in any way feasible. I had no bent for the medical profession, and
still less for what every one thinks the most womanly of
avocations--that of the trained nurse. I could nurse my own relatives
more or less well, but did not distinguish myself in that way, and I
could not devote myself to strangers. The manner in which penniless
young men become lawyers in the United States seems impossible in
Australia. Judge Lindsay, son of a ruined southern family, studied law
and delivered newspapers in the morning, worked in a lawyer's office
through the day, and acted as janitor at night. The course appears to
be shorter, and probably less Latin and Greek were required in a
western State than here. But during the long vacation in summer,
students go as waiters in big hotels at seaside or other health
resorts, or take up some other seasonal trade. All the Columbian guards
at the Chicago Exhibition were students. They kept order, they gave
directions, they wheeled invalids in bath chairs, and they earned all
that was needed, for their next winter's course. In the long high
school holidays youths and maidens who are poor and ambitious work for
money. I have seen fairly well-paid professors who went back to the
father's farm and worked hard all harvest time--and students always did
so. It appears easier in America to get a job for three months'
vacation than in England or Australia, and the most surprising thing
about an American is his versatility. Teaching is with most American
men only a step to something better, so that almost all elementary and
the far greater proportion of high school teaching is in the hands of
women. In Australia our male teachers have to spend so many years
before they are fully equipped that they rarely leave the profession.
The only check on the supply is that the course is so long and
laborious that the youth prefers an easy clerkship. Women, in spite of
the chance of marriage, enter the profession in the United States in
greater numbers, and as the scale of salaries