St. Landry democrat., 1888-08-11
TALMAGE ON EDUCATION.
The Brooklyn Diyine's Earnest Plea TO;
Woman and Her Interests.


Woman and Her interests.
The sylphs. the dryads, the naiads
the gods, have gone out of business
Long1elluw turns out to be better
poet than Homer, and Bancroft Il better
historian than Herodotus, and We have
fltty orators who can beat Demosthenes.
The absurd halo has melted from the
brow of the ancients, and the ola phi
losophers could not keep up with g class
In our Polytechnic or Packer. I have
more respect for the moderns than the
anclents. Washington got angry and
| pitched negro servant out of the win
| dow at Mt. Vernon, and in the biog-
raphy OF Thomas Jefferson we find that
| the signing of the Declaration of indie
pendence was fastened by the fact that
| next to Independence Hall, Philadel-
phla, was a livery stable, and that the
horse-fiies left their perch one day and
attacked the American Congress, and
bit and stung the members so that those
who could not before get their courage
up to sign the tremendous document, at
the intolerable annoyance of the flies
hastily penned their names so as To get
out and away from the cutaneous ilri-
tation.
Collegiate education has been revoll-
tioniZed, and the mind of the student is
not so stuffed with the baggage of Latin
and Greek that he has no room for
practical everyday information. Look
at the graduate of this season and you
will find vast improvement in physique.
BY regetta and baseball club and
gymnasium and military drill. classes
OF healthy men are launched from the
dry-docks instead of those crazy crafts
that were loaded to the waters edge
with physical infrmities enough to sink
them before they got out as far as
quarantine. In many of the institutions
a great achievement has been made in
the fact that male and female education
go side by side just as God intended it.
He put the two sexes beside each other
in Eden. He puts them beside each
other in the family. Why not side by
side in the colleges? This land will not
be what it ought to be until woman has
equal opportunity for thorough educa-
ton with man. She has greater re-
sponsibilities. Certainly she should
not have less opportunity.
The mothers decide the destiny of ma
tions. Men mean and small-souled and
inefficient had mean and small-souled
and inefficient mothers, but good and
grand and useful men had mothers OF
good heart and stout sense. Mother
wit, or lack of it, decides almost every
thing.
Naturally qualified by the Lord with
higher qualities for attendance upon the
sick, why should women not have all
possible advantages of improving her
especial faculty in that direction? Many
of us would have been dead long ago
had it not been for maternal or sisterly
or wifely nursing. 1t is time that the
world stop deriding the female medical |!
colleges, as every spring they hand out |
their diplomas to their graduates. We |
want more womanly lawyers added to
the catalogue of those who are already |
pleading in the courts of this country
No one surely could plead for woman's
life like a woman. Our laws about
dowers, about divorce, about defense
against husbandly squandering OF !
estates, about the holding of property,
will never be what they ought to be I'M
ii there are greater number of women
With severest legal acumen, able to
shape statutes and confront courts on
,hese questions.
Yea, we want female preachers. Sure
y she who was last at the cross and
irst at the sepulchre ought to be able /
o tell the gospel story with surprising
effectiveness. The pulpit has already
lad it's Miss Smiley and it's Lucretia
Mott, and the law in the Presbyterian
Church which arranged clergyman as
criminal if he allowed woman to
reach has been modified to let every
'resbytery do as they think best. The
loors of our colleges, now set ajar to
ct women crowd in, must be swung
vide open. I hail the improved con-
ition of manly education as revealed
n the annual commandments, and the
prospect for womanly achiev-
aent, Notwithstanding the vote of a
celebrated medical society against the
omission of women to membership
7. Dewitt T'alaaage, in Philadelphia