freedom. "Our species," he says in the conclusion of his work on "The Moral Solidarity," "is not necessarily destined to happiness or misery. It is what it makes of itself, and will have the lot it merits." Exact method, idealistic ends, these were the themes constantly recurring in his lessons and consistently illustrated in his work. He was an ardent advocate of the higher education of women, and readily accepted the task of delivering his lectures before the students of both Fontenay-aux-Roses and Sèvres. Mme. Marion entered into his views and became, as it were, the inheritor of his spirit. Possessed

of a gracious presence and of active sympathies she stands before the students under her charge as a noble type of the women who are destined to bear a part in a great public mission.

Two decades have elapsed since the passage of the law providing for the higher education of women under the auspices of the state. For this jubilee year of the Republic, M. Sée has prepared an exhaustive review of the movement with which his name will be forever associated. The new establishments, he explains, are classified as lycées and colleges. It was the original purpose to have a lycée in the chief city of each of the 90 departments of France, the initial cost to be borne by the city, and the annual expenditure by the state. The colleges were to be established in smaller towns upon local initiative and with aid from the state, according to circumstances. As to the actual outcome M. Sée reports that, while before 1880 there were no institutions of this kind in France, in 1900 there are the following: The school for professors at Sèvres, 37 lycées, 3 provisional lycées, 26 colleges, 2 provisional colleges, and a lycée in the protectorate of Tunis.

The financial statement shows that for the capital expenditure on sites and buildings the state advanced from 1881 to 1898 the sum of 33,409,437 francs. The total receipts of the institutions, exclusive of the boarding departments, amounted in 1898 to 3,764,354 francs. Of this sum 27 per cent came from tuition fees, 70 per cent from the state, and the balance from local authorities.

It has been found necessary to establish preparatory departments in the majority of these institutions. Omitting this elementary stage, it appears that in 1882 they comprised 784 students, 4,241 in 1891, and 7,003 in 1899. The full course of study occupies five years, to which a sixth year may be added, intended particularly for students who desire to enter the Superior Normal School at Sèvres. of the total students enrolled 388 were in the sixth year.

In 1899 This num

ber represents fairly the proportion of students in any year who expect to make teaching a profession. A large part, probably the majority of the students, are from the families of the wealthy bourgeois, who are rapidly coming into control of public affairs, and whose daughters are educated with a view to domestic and social life.

The teaching force of these lycées and colleges in 1899 comprised 647 professors and assistants. If the staff seems excessively large as compared with the number of students, we must remember that French custom calls for a great amount of individual tutoring and supervision. I may add from personal observation that the principle of subdivision in labor is admirably maintained. Every one of these teachers is a trained specialist; but the unity of the whole work is preserved through the Directrice and her immediate assistant, the supervisor of the programmes. This policy may not be favorable to that free, sympathetic coöperation which develops in our own college faculties; but it does impart to each establishment an impressive appearance of order and repose.

Thus far I have considered the movement for the higher education of women in France wholly in the light of its relation to the Republic and to republican policies. In all essential particulars it is a creation of the Republic, and yet it has historic relation to the movement that swept over our own country between 1860 and 1870 and affected England deeply in the closing years of that period. It was in 1867 that the Bishop of Orleans made an open protest against the prevailing system of woman's education in France. "The education of women," he wrote, "is meagre, frivolous, and superficial, when it is not false." "It was limited," said Camille Sée, interpreting the protest according to his clearer light, "to elementary branches, and," he adds with undisguised irony, "the art of being agreeable." The impulse to reform did not exhaust itself in protests. The same year in which these utterances appeared university courses for women, as they were called, but to speak more exactly, courses by university professors, were created by M. Duruy, then minister of education. The prestige of his name drew patronage, and for a while the "courses" flourished. They continue in a modified form even to the present day, but their chief value lies in the fact that they prepared the way for the later and more substantial work. Omitting this somewhat desultory instruction that draws about 3,000 hearers annually, it appears that in 1897 there were 9,000 young women pursuing these studies in the institutions of collegiate grade,

The universities of France have not been considered in this survey. Nominally, these institutions which admit only graduates to their highly specialized training have been long open to women. From time to time a few foreign women entered, and occasionally a French woman. Suddenly the number of the latter became noticeable: in 1892 there were 258, to-day there are 579. The progress is remarkable: nearly 600 French women of approved capacity are · pursuing graduate studies in universities noted for their high requirements. We count but 1,400 in our own country!

This movement is no surface ripple. Ten thousand young women moulded annually into the new life, brought under rational discipline, accustomed to the discussion of the grandest themes of human thought, made to realize their own moral freedom and responsibility, what influences, what transforming power, must flow from them! Already the effect is seen beyond the pale of the state schools. Girls from parochial schools are seeking state diplomas, and the Catholic seminaries for girls vied with each other in their exhibits in showing that their instruction had worthier elements than the "art of being agreeable."

Frenchmen are sometimes represented as having sentimental feelings only toward women. The view is superficial. Nowhere is the influence of mothers greater, nowhere is more chivalrous respect professed for women. It is woman's mission to inspire in man the conceptions of honor and of glory. Change the ideals of women in any nation and you re-create those of men. A deep insight into the causes of social conditions inspired the Republic to provide higher education for women founded in reason and in the sense of personal responsibility. ANNA TOLMAN SMITH,

The Forum

JANUARY, 1901.

THE LIBERAL PARTY IN ENGLAND.

It has been said that the Liberal party has been ruined by two great Liberal leaders that Mr. Chamberlain began the ruin by deserting to the enemy, with the plans of campaign in his pocket, and that Lord Rosebery cast his party into outer darkness, because he would throw away the old lamps and put in new lamps of his own.

The general election just completed has not annihilated the Liberal party, but it has demonstrated its impotence. In this paper an attempt is made, from behind the scenes, to make the real operative causes of the collapse intelligible to others. Mr. Chamberlain is not an adept in asking too much. He never expected to wipe out Liberalism. He wished to stop the pendulum, and has succeeded. The pessimists go further, and those who hate Liberal ideas are naturally exultant. They believe they have at last got everything their own way. They have captured the press; they have misled the proletariate; they have "rushed" the sober middle class with dazzling dreams of ever expanding markets. If free speech is not bludgeoned to silence, as in the crisis of the war fever, men are still being cowed into insincere compromise with conscience. Parliamentary independence has been crushed to order. Parliamentary morality has been dulled to lower standards of personal honor. A scene such as that last February, when Mr. Chamberlain was solemnly whitewashed by his party after declining to face the inquiry or to produce the documents which would establish his guilt or innocence, left the worst impression on those who love the House of Commons.

Copyright, 1900, by The Forum Publishing Company.
Permission to republish articles is reserved.

The manipulation of "world-politics" by great financial "bosses" seems assured. At no period since the Stuart Restoration has reaction achieved such victory over the freedom and sincerity of thought and action. From the current press, and from the chatter of club smoking rooms, the dodo is not more extinct than the Englishmen of the days of Kossuth or Mazzini, or the Englishmen who rose in their might to denounce the Bulgarian massacres of 1876, or even the Englishmen in whose hearts five years ago the almost dying appeal of the greatest Englishman of the age aroused an echo of the old sentiments over the ghastly horrors of Armenia. The cynicism of Rudyard Kipling seems to rule supreme; and in such an atmosphere Liberalism cannot thrive.

May not the South African war have been a "wire-puller's as well as a "capitalist's" war? According to our witty diarist, Mr. George Russell, this very trick was foreseen five years ago by an old parliamentary hand. "It is always difficult for an opposition to oppose a government conducting a war; and our friend Chamberlain is the very man to take advantage of that."

There was motive enough. People forget that fifteen months ago speech after speech from government benches admitted a Liberal victory to be more than probable. No such overwhelming evidence of growing distrust of a ministry had been known for half a century. The great Unionist victory of 1895, with its majority of 152 seats, had been won, the London "Times" calculated, by the conversion of about one Liberal in every nineteen to Unionist views. But the votes given between 1895 and 1899 in forty-three constituencies in Great Britain-not including Ireland-that had been contested at the general election of 1895 and at by-elections subsequently showed a transfer not of one in nineteen, or 5 per cent, but of one in thirteen, or 7.5 per cent, from the Unionist to the Liberal side. And the biggest gains had been in the great urban and suburban constituencies, where Liberalism had been weakest for years. A wave like this spread over the whole country would have meant a Liberal majority over both the Unionist and the Irish. Its rushing volume increased the popular dislike of a ministry that forgot the Old Age Pensions in their election addresses of 1895, and emptied the national till into the pockets of the privileged classes.

Mr. Chamberlain knew what it meant, and that a "frontal attack" on a disappointed people, visibly preparing to belabor a discredited Ministry, as a South Sea islander whips his gods when