A PLEA FOR THE HIGHER EDUCATION

OF MOTHERS.

BY

F. S. BURTON, B. S., LL. B.

ODERN civilization plumes itself upon its supposed advance over all other civilizations in the depth and extent of its culture; but it is not impossible that it overrates itself.

This is emphatically the age of the practical. The end of all education, it teaches, is to assist in "making a living" for the learner. The intellect must be trained to work directly for the sustentation of the body. The test of a course or curriculum of study usually is this:-Will it aid one who pursues and completes it in his struggle for bread and butter; or, if more ambitious, in accumulating wealth? Hence, this is the age of industrial schools, and business colleges,- of classes in cookery, and schools of journalism,—all of which institutions are well; but most of which fail because they are founded on a mistaken idea of the end to be attained, and are

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hence inadequate to accomplish even the partial results their founders have in view at their inception.

For those whose parents are the possessors of wealth, as the tendency runs, thorough intellectual culture, or even the semi-culture afforded by these industrial schools, or the better class thereof, is regarded as less necessary (in fact, quite unnecessary, perhaps, were it not esteemed almost as difficult a problem to keep inherited wealth as to accumulate property in the first instance), and accomplishment takes the place of education, polish is sought rather than culture.

The daughters of the wealthier classes, particularly, do not appear to require the fortification against want which, in this narrow interpretation of the age, education should give. Their "expectations" from parental estates, or promising alliances, appear to remove them far beyond any necessity of taking upon themselves these plebeian cares. I speak now of classes, not of those glorious exceptions (for such there are) to the sordid rule. And with the sons of the rich, why should deep culture be an object of anxiety when a certain business shrewdness or sharpness of intellect only is the end aimed at.

How narrow, how trivial, how poor, how pitiful this view of life is, a single moment's thought should be sufficient to show the intelligent and candid person. If human existence has a meaning,-if life is aught but a transitory vapor,-if creation itself is not a poor farce-too sad with disappointed hopes, stifled aspirations, eternally baffled upward-strugglings, and tears and groans of its noblest creatures to excite one wretched smile- then, to constitute the true education, something more is needed than merely the strengthening or supplying of those powers which will enable the learner to grasp and hold a little more or less of the dross of the earth men call wealth. If there be worth in moral character, if the human soul be a sacred thing, if there be a life beyond this life, if there be a

heaven and a God, and a relationship existing which in any way gives mortal beings an interest in things high and holy, then the nineteenth-century idea of education, in its narrower interpretation, is founded on the saddest of mistakes!

It is an outgrowth of the notion that the principal, if not the sole object, of culture is to win wealth, fame, distinction, and, so far as it relates to women, it is coupled with another notion somewhat older perhaps (and one which this age appears more willing to abandon), but equally erroneous, and as saddening in its effects, viz: that the married woman has little or no real existence separate and apart from that of her husband, and, as a matter of course, shares in the glory of his achieve...... ments. This it is which has made it seem unimportant to the world whether her mental powers were disciplined or otherwise; and hence has it been that, with woman in particular, accomplishment has taken the place of deep culture,―the ornamental has been aimed at rather than the useful in education.

Every earnest lover of his kind must deplore this tendency of the age, which, it would be unfair to deny, it has inherited from former ages.

Not necessary that the minds of the mothers of the human race be cultivated! Whose, then? Why the lines:

"The hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that moves the world!"

in a pleasant, simple statement convey a weighty truth. But a weightier lies behind: The fate through the eternal years of progress of every human being, more than upon any other merely human circumstance, depends upon what lessons have been taught him at his mother's knee,—what influences have been breathed into his soul by the being who bore, who first loved, and who nurtured him during his earliest and most susceptible years!

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Think of this, mothers, as you gaze into the sweet angelfaces of the helpless darlings lying in your arms, and tremble at your responsibility, while you pray for to enable you to perform aright your mission with the heavengrace and strength sent little stranger.

I repeat, if there were no such thing as futurity,- no such possibility as a posterity to suffer for our sins of commission, or omission,- no hope of a future upward progress, or danger

of deeper degradation for the race, no possibility of human achievement higher than that of accumulating sordid riches for purposes merely temporary and at best so poor,—my position would lose much of its significance, and I had remained silent.

It is, at length, an acknowledged fact of physiology, that the child of an intelligent and refined woman will frequently inherit its mother's intelligence and refinement, notwithstanding the coarseness, even vulgarity, of its father; and one acute observer and able writer has declared that most men of transcendent abilities nearly resemble their maternal parent in their mental and spiritual constitutions. On the other hand, the sons and daughters of a coarse, uncultured mother are almost certain to exhibit corresponding intellectual traits, even when descended from cultivated and refined people by the father.

Hence, it is almost axiomatic that woman, in relation to the weal or woe of posterity, through her peculiar functions as mother and nurse, exercises tenfold the power that is exercised by man; and according as she employs that power beneficently or otherwise, is she a good angel, smiling down upon all succeeding ages, or a malignant spirit, the curse of whose existence will be felt to the remotest generation!

"A pebble in the streamlet scant

Hath turned the course of many a river;

A dew-drop on the tender plant

Hath warped the giant oak forever!"

In the light of these truths, how important must it appear that the course of mental and spiritual training marked out for woman should be carefully framed with wise reference to the development of every noble faculty of her mind and heart, of every power of the sweet mother-soul, until that crowning earthly glory, perfect womanhood, stands confessed!