ENGLISH Y. COLONIAL LIFE FOR GIRLS.
[To THE EDITOR 07 THE " SPECTATOR:1 Sin,—The writer of the letter on " English v. Colonial Life for Girls " in the Spectator of September 4th gives us her views on the lives, occupations, and respective merits of English and Colonial girls, each in their own homes. I should like to ask her whether she has any experience of the English girl in a Colonial home. (Or does she perhaps consider that the moment she reaches the Colonies the English girl becomes a Colonial ?) If she has met any English girl living a Colonial life, I should further like to ask her whether she really found her so incapable, unresourceful, and afraid of roughing it as she thinks the average English girl at home to be. I am glad to say that I know a good number of English girls living a Colonial life who are, I think, quite the equals of their Colonial sisters. I have seen them make wardrobes and sofas out of packing-cases, upholster their own chairs, supply their households with hot baths from a boiler made from a paraffin tin, undertake the family washing (which included fetching their own water, for the willing and helpful man is not always at hand even in the Colonies !), besides preparing all the meals, making the butter, and looking after poultry and garden.
I entirely agree with the writer of the article in the same issue on "English and Colonial Girls." It is not that the English girl is afraid of roughing it, or that she lacks the intelligence to make the best of circumstances, or the ingenuity to make a home out of unpromising surroundings. It is that in England she never has the need or opportunity of exercising these qualities, and consequently is, perhaps, almost unaware of their existence. Given the opportunity and necessity, I think she would be quite ready to give up her Bridge and novel-reading for more productive and useful occupations.
As to the Domestic Training College where the girls "learn to make sweets and cakes," there may be such a College (and I can imagine that some of the younger students might think it rather an attractive place !), but personally I have not come across it. At one Domestic College with which I am rather intimately acquainted, and at which for the past seventeen years we have been trying, and not unsuccessfully, to prepare English girls to become Colonists, we teach them how to undertake all the cooking, washing, and housework needed for a good-sized family. They bake " home-made bread" in a brick oven (which they themselves bring in the wood to heat), and although they do not make " home-brewed beer," they take, I think, quite as much pleasure in the contemplation and consumption of their own jams and pickles, to say nothing of their own home-cured bacon, as any Colonial girl. Our one complaint is that we do not get enough students. And here I agree with the writer of the letter in blaming the parents, who will not realise what a much happier, fuller life they might provide for their daughters if they would train them and send them to the " England beyond the seas " ins' ead of keeping them idle at home. We know that better- class Englishwomen are wanted there ; we know that we have them here, in many cases simply wasting the best years of their lives doing nothing for their country or their generation.
What is needed is some means of convincing the girls, and those responsible for them, of the infinite possibilities of happiness and usefulness within the reach of all those Englishwomen who will equip themselves properly, and with brave hearts and capable hands follow their countrymen across the sea. Whether to South Africa, Canada, or Australia matters little; they are needed everywhere.—I am,
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