Weekly Calaveras chronicle., 1868-03-14
The Education of Women.

The following is from the able pen Of
Mr. Ruskin. Our lady readers will find
in it lesson worthy of their study, and
a deserved tribute to their sex:
You have first to mould her physical
frame, and then, as the strength she
gains will permit you. to fill and temper
her mind with all knowledge and
thoug hts which tend to confirm its nat
ural instincts ofjustice aud refine its nat
ural tact of love.
All such knowledge should be given
her as man enable her to understand,
and even to aid, the work of men; and
yet it should be given, not as knowledge,
not as if it were or could be, an object
to know but only of feel and to judge.
1t is of no moment, as matter of pride,
correctness or perfectness in himself,
whether she knows many languages or
one, but it is of the utmost that she
should be able to show kindness to a
stranger, and to understand the sweet
ness of strangers tongue. 1t is of no
moment to her worth or dignity that
she should be acquainted with this sci
ence or that, but it is of the highest that
she should be trained in habits of accu-
rate thought, that she should understand
the meaning, the inevitableness and the
lines of natural law, and follow at least
some one path of scientific attainment,
as far as to the threshold of the bitter
Valley of Humiliation, into which only
the wisest and bravest of men can de-
scend owning themselves forever chill
dren gathering pebles on a soundless
shore. 1t is of little consequence how
many positions of cities she knows, OF
how many dates of events, or how many
names of celebrated persons-it is net
the object of education to turn woman
into dictionary, but is deeply necessa.
ry that she should be taught to enter
with her whole personality into the
history she reads, to picture the passag.
es of it vitality in her own bright imagin-
alton; to apprehend with her fine in
stincts, the pathetic circumstances and
dramatic relations which the historian
too often only eclipses by his reasoning,
and disconnects by his arrangement
1t is for her to trace the hidden equalties
of divine reward, and catch sight,
through the darkness, of the fatal
threads of woven fire that connect error
with its retribution. But chiefly of all,
she is to be taught to extend the limits
of her sympathy with respect to that
history which is being forever deter
mined as the moments pass in which she
draws her peaceful breath, and to the
contemporary calamity, which were it
but rightly mourned by her, would
recur no more hereafter. She is to ex-
ercise herself in imagining what would
be the effects upon her mind and con.
duct if she were brought into the pres
ence of the suffering which is not the
less real because shut for her sight She
is to be taught somewhat to understand
the nothingness of the proportion which
that little world in which God lives and
loves, and solemnly she is to be taught
to strive that her thoughts of piety may
be feeble in proportion to the number
they embrace, not her prayer more
languid than it is for the momentary
relief from pain of her husband or her
child, when it is uttered for the multi.
tude of those who have none to love
them, and is for all who are desolate
land onnressed