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had expended upon his workpeople, but at the same time actually to increase his business and his profits, whilst he benefited those dependent on him, and acquired their good-will and grateful esteem. And here it is only just to say that my host was not the originator of this kindly policy in the management of his business. Many of the institutions I have mentioned owed their origin to his father; and the son in inheriting the business inherited also the wisdom to see that, in developing the friendly feeling which he found in existence between employer and employed, he was taking the most practical steps to augment the family fortune, as well as to carry out the wishes of his wise and benevolent father.

There was something almost patriarchal in the way in which this business was managed. Although the present proprietor was a man of middle age with sons and daughters, there were those in his pay who still regarded him as a boy, and could not forget that time had slipped away since the days that their present employer ran in and out of the factory as a lad, when they were in the prime of life, striving to do their duty toward their old and beloved master.

If philanthropy in connection with commercial enterprise can be shown, as in this instance, to lead to increased profits, those of us who desire to see an improvement in the condition of the manufacturing population, and a better feeling springing up between employer and employed, may take heart of grace, for it will not be long before the example of my kindly host and of his father will be followed by many who cannot lay claim to any more generous desire than that of benefiting themselves.

Should the successful application of Christian principle to the management of a large business induce other employers to spend more time, more thought, more trouble, and more money in improving the condition of their workpeople, I shall have accomplished the purpose for which I have written the above short account of an interesting visit paid to what I feel justified in designating as a model factory.

MEATH.

GIRLS' SCHOOLS, PAST AND PRESENT.

I.

MISS SEWELL has, with great candour, admitted that she criticises with 'hesitation,' because she cannot feel' that she has a 'sufficient acquaintance with facts to justify an absolute conviction of the truth' of her impressions.' I venture therefore to supplement her interesting article by wider and more varied recollections. Mine do not date as far back as hers, but I can go back a long way. My experience as Principal of the Cheltenham Ladies' College since 1858 enables me to speak with some confidence of the later educational developments. I can sympathise with what she says about the good old times when we were young,' but I feel also that one would no more go back to the educational methods of those times than one would to the oil lamps and rush-lights of one's childhood. As we talk of pre-Raphaelite painting, so we might speak of pre-Victorian education, so great has been the change. There are evils now, but those who have read the Reports of the Royal Commission of twenty years ago, must acknowledge that the improvement in the education of girls is something to be thankful for. Thackeray's description of the past is scarcely overdrawn. This is the condition of a young lady's existence: She breakfasts at eight; she does Mangnall's Questions with a governess till ten; she practises till one; she walks in the square with bars round her till two; then she practises again; then she sews, or reads French or Hume's History; then she comes down to play to papa, because he likes music, whilst he is asleep after dinner.'

This College was the first Proprietary Girls' School, and now they are innumerable; it was one of the first to send in pupils for University examinations. Though I have never taught in a High School, yet I have obtained as member of the Council of the Church Schools Company, which has already established seventeen schools, and in other ways, a sufficiently intimate knowledge of their working to be able to argue that they are not liable to at least some of Miss Sewell's censures, and that for others they are not responsible, though I shall willingly admit that she has pointed to some defects which might be remedied. I shall perhaps do well to follow Miss Sewell's lead in making my paper in part autobiographical.

If we look back forty years we shall find no day schools for girls, except for the poor. Above the national schools were self-supporting day schools, in which a meagre education was given, but the professional classes had private governesses, resident or daily, and supplemented their instruction by lessons from visiting teachers, or the girls were sent for a few years to finish at a boarding school.

That was the course pursued in our own home: the education was just such as Miss Sewell describes. We were familiar with Pinnock's Catechisms, Mangnall's Questions, and the various epitomes which contained the history of the world. We read Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, Marcet's Natural Philosophy. We were fortunate in obtaining one excellent governess, who had been educated in a good French school, and who grounded us well in the language; but, as there were no examinations by which governesses could be in any way tested, the choice was in several cases found to be unfortunate. One had to take a teacher 'at her own valuation,' or that of her friends. Governesses were often not only ignorant, but unaware of their ignorance, and would propose to teach things of which they had no real knowledge. Those who object to examinations altogether, little know the trouble that mothers in those days had in making a selection. I can remember the large basketful of letters, which my mother received in answer to an advertisement, and how she proceeded (in a way no longer pleasing to me as a spelling reformer)—rejecting those letters which contained original orthography. The teaching of those days was often only asking questions and listening to the answers of the catechisms, or at most setting a book to be read and asking questions on it. The only really inspiring teaching we had in our early years was the informal sort obtained from the reading and conversation of family life. When, after several failures, governesses were given up, and we went to a boarding school, the routine was very much that described by Miss Sewell. We learned by heart large portions of Scripture, and beautiful poems, which have been a treasure through life; but we learned by heart also worthless epitomes, and our thinking power was hindered from developing by intercourse with one another, because we were required to speak a tongue in which we could indeed talk, but in which conversation was impossible; and the language we spoke was one peculiar to English boarding schools. Still, though there were many disadvantages, I feel I gained much by my school experience; our mistresses were women who had read and thought; they had taken pains to arrange various schemes of knowledge, and so we left, as Miss Sewell says she did, with the consciousness that there were large tracts to be explored by us, and with the knowledge that our education was only begun.

The next few years were spent at home, helping our schoolboy brothers, reading omnivorously, taking up—with the help of visiting teachers various subjects in succession, dreaming much, and seeking

for a fuller realisation of the great spiritual realities which make one feel that all knowledge is sacred, for it is in its measure a knowledge of God, and so 'work is worship,' a blessed service to Him who has called us to work on with Him in high companionship.'

It was the time of a great religious revival; the bald services of my childhood were beginning to develop into the musical services of our own time. It would lead me too far to attempt a discussion of its effects. The beautiful music of to-day is not more dear to me than those plain services, with often grotesque accompaniments, where I learned to see heaven opened. Miss Sewell's writings, especially the Experience of Life, helped me in early youth to work out the problems of my daily life. Religion quickened the intellectual life, for sacramental teaching was to the real leaders of that movement no narrow dogmatism, but the discovery of 'the river of the water of life,' flowing through the whole desert of human existence, and making it rejoice and blossom as the rose, revealing a unity in creation, a continuity in history, a glory in art, a purpose in life, making life infinitely worth living.' The interpreters of this consciousness were par excellence Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites; it is expressed in Holman Hunt's last great work, the Triumph of the Innocents. Simultaneously with the religious movement there was, therefore, an intellectual one, resulting in the establishment everywhere of Literary Institutions, which women could join, and where lectures were given and libraries were formed. Most of them had a transitory existence, and have given place to more ambitious institutions; but these were of great use in awakening intellectual life, and the London Institution, the first and most important of its kind, with its splendid library and its learned librarians, was very advantageous to us.

The Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Mr. Pullen, of Cambridge, by his inspiring teaching stirred in me a passion for mathematics, which was considered by many of my friends unfeminine. I was delighted to find it possible to calculate the distance of the moon, even without the trigonometry which I lacked. For some years I was unable to get any teaching, but I read Euclid alone, going conscientiously through the fifth book, and even the eleventh and twelfth, and making some way in algebra. I certainly wasted much time, that a little friendly advice and guidance would have saved; yet it is good to have wrestled with difficulties, and this period helped me to feel that the chief work of the educator is to help others to find out for themselves. The great difference between an education during those after-school years from fifteen to eighteen and that of girls nowadays is, that ours was desultory, theirs is systematised. We had comparatively little help, and had to struggle over some stiles as best we could; they scarcely reach one, ere a hundred hands are held out to enable them to cross it gracefully and easily.

The most important influences of all, and which I suppose we

of the old school feel that no High Schools can supply, were derived from reading and conversation, and sympathy of our parents, relatives, and friends. I earnestly desire that this should never be omitted from the curriculum of our day schools, and I trust that, when the present transition period is over, mothers who know what day-school teaching is, will be able to enter with fuller sympathy into their children's studies, and to supplement them at home: already as I am gathering my grandchildren around me I find this is becoming increasingly the case. I shall never forget how we learned to love Shakspere, through my father's reading to us, when we were quite young, selected portions. History and general literature we would read with our mother, and listen with delight to her stories of the eventful era she had lived through.

An aunt of hers, Mrs. Cornwallis, exercised also much indirect influence. She learned Hebrew when a grandmother to teach her grandson James Trimmer. She wrote a book in four volumes on the Canonical Scriptures, which was subscribed to by Queen Charlotte and the grandees of the day, and was found in most libraries early in this century. Her husband, a ripe scholar, a nephew of Archbishop Cornwallis, used to read Greek and Latin aloud to his daughter Caroline. Caroline was the anonymous author of many of the Small Books on Great Subjects, published by Pickering. From my invalid aunt, who was much with this cousin, I learned Italian; with her I read Latin, and together we worked at mathematics: but above all she let me talk out my religious and philosophical difficulties. She did not teach me to think of the Father, as of some mediæval schoolmaster, ready to chastise those who did not know, and could not understand; she was not shocked, as some of my relatives were, when I could not follow the beaten track, and if I took a wrong line she would first enter sympathetically into my way of thinking, and then gently lead me to see hers.

In 1847, with characters ripe for observation, my sisters and I went to one of the most expensive of the Parisian schools frequented by English girls; it was kept by English ladies of the ancien régime. It was excellent in all the mechanical details-the suites of rooms, the gardens, the time tables, the exercise books in uniform, the marking, &c.; but for the rest! Well, we learned by heart the rules. of Noël and Chapsal, which warned us English girls against faults we had no mind to,' whilst omitting any mention of those 'we were inclined to. Long lists of verbs and exceptions we had to get by heart, which proved about as useless as As in præsenti' and' Propria quæ maribus,' which our brothers were simultaneously getting by 'heart' in England. We were required to learn all the prepositions, in order that we might parse without the fatigue of thinking. I learned them with such anger that the list was burnt into my brain, and I can say it now. It did not occur to our teachers that there

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