Mr. Fawcett made a sensible speech at Hackney on Tuesday,
in favour of the Girls' Public Day-school Company, in which he 'urged that it was not possible as yet to say whether the average force of a woman's mind is or is not equal to that of an average man, considering the long and hereditary neglect of their education, but that even if it be definitely less, that is no reason at all for not cultivating it to the best of our ability. He deprecated for girls, as for boys, the utilitarian view of education which is .always asking of any study, "Is it one that will be practically 'useful to them in after-life ?" Studies never taken up again after the period of youth are often felt by thoughtful men to lave been of the greatest possible service to the intellectual dis- cipline of their minds, and so, too, it must be with women. That is not only good sense, but good sense which in certain spheres everybody acts upon. When children are taught to commit verse or prose to memory, nobody asks whether the particular passages so learned by heart will be useful to them in after-life. We know -that the memory is exercised and strengthened by the process, and that is enough ; and if it is good to strengthen the memory by one exercise, it must be equally good or better to strengthen the reasoning or imaginative powers by another.
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