ADDRESS

AT THE END OF THE FIRST TERM.

HOSE of you who have brothers at any of our

THOSE

public Schools will know that a short time before the vacations there are days set apart for Speeches. No such custom, not even the faintest imitation of it, will, I hope, ever establish itself among us. Whether it is on the whole for good or for evil that those, who must hereafter appear on a larger stage before more general audiences, should be practised in these rehearsals, I am not competent to decide. But I am sure that we should prove ourselves utterly unfit to take any part in your education, if we did not feel that it ought, in its aim and in its methods, to keep display at the greatest possible distance.

Of course, after an opening Session of only a few weeks it will be impossible that we could call you together for any purpose of this kind. But I wish to tell you that we shall be doing as absurd a thing, that we shall be departing as widely from the principle of our College, if we make the attempt next year or the year after that. I would seize the first opportunity which presents itself, to remind you that the effects of Education which are most visible and

brilliant, are precisely those for which we care least ; precisely those which we shall not take pains to produce. We did not think a College needful because there had not been enough of show and excitement in female education. We feared there had been too much; we believed that any effort was desirable which could make it more quiet, more unpretending, more in harmony with the course of an orderly domestic life.

Perhaps you will call me presumptuous for speaking of a domestic life, when the very constitution of our Society excludes us from the least controul over any part of your time except that which is occupied in study. On a former occasion I boasted of this as one of our chief merits. We do not venture upon a ground which has been given into other hands to cultivate; which is never, as we conceive, thoroughly well cultivated except by those hands. We could provide no substitute for the family which would not be a very wretched one. But if we are bound to abstain from meddling where we should do mischief, we are also bound to see that when we do meddle we are not counteracting the good that might come to you from any other quarter. Intellectual pursuits may have this effect. They may make a woman less homely in her trust and affections; more restless, more ambitious. They must have this effect, it seems to me, whenever the object set before the students is external success; whenever they learn

chiefly that they may surpass others, or that they may have something to talk of, or that they may exercise a new kind or measure of power and fascination. All studies, pursued with such ends, make the restraints, limitations, diversities of temper and inclination, in a home circle, irksome and intolerable. A person of any quickness and ability who is thus instructed, acquires a sense of strength and independence which she fancies can have no sufficient exercise but in the great world. And her restlessness is increased by another cause. There is a secret feeling, that the knowledge which has been acquired under this stimulus is not sound knowledge. Though much time has been spent upon it, yet it is hastily put together, because the mind was always more occupied with the advantages which were to come of it, than with the thing itself; because the teacher, like the learner, was more careful to have his flowers ready for a gala-day, than to watch the roots. Discontent must accompany the consciousness of insincerity. As the father of a family is often ill tempered and miserable because he is living on borrowed capital, and knows not how soon he may be called on to meet his engagements; so the son or daughter of a family is often as peevish and unhappy, from the sense of living upon merely apparent intellectual stores which may any day be exhausted by a sudden demand. I think I have observed, that the pain which this feeling occasions is often more acute in your sex than

in ours; a sign that you can less easily endure any departure from simplicity and truth.

However little then we can do directly for the moral and domestic character, we can, it seems to me, indirectly, if we determine to make every part of our teaching sound and substantial; of that kind which will not leave a momentary impression on the surface, but will every day penetrate more deeply till it becomes a part of your life.

Such knowledge will combine with all other healthy and humane influences; you will scarcely distinguish it from them. The ordinary intercourse of the family circle will be raised by it, but will not cross or contradict it. There will come out of it no literary affectations; no contempt for what is common or humble. You will learn from it that there is a poetry in daily tasks, which only is lost to us through our insensibility and selfishness, and which, when we are in our right mind, and are not thinking of ourselves, we shall always be able to draw out. The varieties of character which strike us in those with whom we are brought into closer intercourse, will not grate upon ours, but will come in to illustrate and realize what we have read of, and to make us feel what a book of wonders is daily open before us, if we will only read in it. You will see how much more of monotony there is in a large body of people whom you meet in court-dresses, than in half-a-dozen whom you actually know: in whom some fresh

characteristic often, it is true, dark, but often bright and beautiful, may be, appearing every hour. The family altar will explain the mystery of the family hearth, will glorify it and will connect it with common human life, as we see it before us or read of it in History.

Such results, I do believe, follow from real education, and prove that all the efforts which have been made to rob your sex of it, under pretence of making them more devoted to housewifery, were blundering efforts, likely in all times, sure in our own, to defeat the object which they seek.

The teachers in our different departments may have succeeded or failed: but I am certain they have endeavoured to give a real, and not a shew education. They have not taught for effect. And they have felt, and desire to express the delight with which they have felt, that your object is the same as theirs; that you are willing to learn upon the only condition on which they can teach the condition of caring to know what is the truth of things, and of being patient, that you may know. This conviction is more to them a thousandfold than any direct results which you could produce, any evidence you could give to a bystander, that you had been the better for coming here. If you have the evidence in yourselves, not that you know much more than you did before, but that you are in a way of learning; that you have discovered where you are ignorant; and that