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THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.
ing party for the Institution for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind; a concert or lecture often given by some eminent person. About a quarter of the working expenses is met by students’ fees, the rest by gifts from friends and from the city companies. Miss Frances Martin is the honorary secretary. The College for Men and Women in Oueen Square, London, founded in 1864. carries on a similar work.
The College by Post, founded in 1881, sprang out of an effort which I made in my own early days at college to help, by correspondence, other girls whose opportunities were fewer than my own. University College, London; Westfield College, Hampstead; Griton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge, and Lady Margaret and Somerville Halls, Oxford; the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, and kindred institutions for higher education, have contributed to a staff on which between two and three hundred teachers have now been enrolled. P'rom all parts of the United Kingdom, from the continent and the colonies, students representing many different conditions of life and degrees of education have joined to the number of between three and four thousand. Competition with professional teachers is carefully avoided, and no “ coaching ” for examinations, other than our own, is undertaken. Giving half an hour daily to Bible study in one of our seventy Scripture classes is the condition of receiving gratuitous instruction in other subjects. The scheme of historical Scripture study, which I have elaborated for our students, has now been published in a volume called “ Clews to Holy Writ,” which went into its third thousand within a few weeks of its publication. About twenty subjects are taught in our secular classes. The hygiene class; which is conducted by a medalist of the National Health Society, is one of the most popular of these. The wise and kindly influence of teacher upon taught, and the friendships, helpful to both, which grow up through their work together, are, perhaps, the most valuable and the least describable part of the scheme. Through the “writing mission,” suggested by Lady Wright, some hundreds of our students are also in friendly correspondence with factory girls.
So we pass from the intellectual to the moral sphere, and to organizations that aim at enabling people to be, rather than to know, taking first those that aim at fitting special classes for special duties. The Home and Colonial School Society, established in 1836, is for the Christian training of women teachers, and sends forth annually some seventy-five to elementary schools, and some fifty to family teaching and secondary schools. Little can be done by the best of schools for those whose home influences are adverse, and this was never truer than it is today, when the day-school system prevails widely for every class of the community Hence the importance of insisting upon the sacred responsibilities of parents, often so lightly undertaken and so thoughtlessly delegated to others. At the request of some Bradford mothers, Miss Charlotte M. Mason, in 1888, drew up a scheme for assisting parents of all classes to study the laws of education as they bear upon the bodily development, moral training, intellectual work and religious bringing up of children. The Bishop of Ripon’s wife was the first president of the Parents’ National PIducational Union, and the Earl and Countess of Aberdeen are the present presidents. Among those who warmly took up the scheme were Dr. Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham, the Bishop of London, Miss Beale of Cheltenham College, Miss Clough of Newnham College, and Miss Buss of the North London Collegiate School. Its organ is the “Parents’ Review,” an admirable monthly. The House of Education offers definite training to those who hope to become mothers or governesses. “ I was deeply impressed,” said Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, in November, 1892, “ with the earnest and business-like way in which the students addressed themselves to their work, and I do not doubt that they will devote themselves to the care of children with exceptional zeal and knowledge.”
Throughout we have to recognize a duty not only to the destitute and degraded, but to those who ask not alms but help of human fellowship, and appeal less to our pity than to our sympathy. It is through the co-operation, and not through the conflict of classes, that progress will be made, and the amount of this co-operation will