stractions, and make of them what he or she likes; it requires a more philosophic mind and vastly more patience and attention to deal with concrete facts and organic systems. Mrs. Johnson's book will repay a careful perusal and reperusal. Whatever errors she may have fallen into upon points of detail—and it is almost impossible that, dealing with so vast an array of facts as she has done, she should not have fallen into some—she has got to the root of the matter. Her formula for man and woman is not, as with the suffragists, 2a, but ab, each the coefficient of the other, and both together forming a compound unity. Her book rests on the solid ground of Nature, and will survive many dreary diatribes of the 2a school of social reformers.
THE DICTUM OF A PHILOSOPHER.
Mr. Thomas Davidson is by all accounts a philosopher. He is profound in Aristotle and Rosmini, and can tell to a shade just where Kant failed to grasp the problem of human knowledge. He has written magisterially on the subject of education. He is therefore a man whose utterances ought to be marked by a very superior wisdom, particularly on the subjects which he claims to have made his own. Strange to say, however, we fail to see any great wisdom, or even, to put it plainly, much sense in a remark in which he indulges in the July Forum. He there discusses the changes that have taken place in England during the last sixty years, and, in doing so, takes occasion to say that "the education of children, which formerly was let out to teachers as the washing of clothes was to washerwomen, is now regarded as a matter demanding the careful attention of parents. If this means anything it means that the giving of clothes to a washerwoman to wash may be taken as a typical instance of a matter that does not receive careful attention—a matter about which people are proverbially indifferent.
Now, we do not claim a very profound knowledge of the household diplomacy which results in the making of treaties with washerwomen; but, so far as any echoes of the proceedings have reached our ears, we have received an impression that very considerable interest is taken in the choice of an efficient washerwoman, and that the subsequent performance of the person selected is watched with close attention. We have reason to believe that questions are very frequently raised as to whether the clothes have been properly treated in the washerwoman's hands; and that if they come back unsatisfactory in color, badly ironed or folded, or showing signs of excessive use of alkali, sharp remonstrances are made. If the case is serious, the clothes are not again given to the inefficient or destructive operator, but search is at once made for one who will do the work better. If we are not up to date in our notions on this subject, we are sorry for it; all that we can say is that it used to be so. What are we to say, then, to the learned professor's typical example of slipshod indifference? Only this, that it was very ill-chosen, and that the professor is evidently more at home on the dizzy peaks of a transcendental philosophy than in the region of domestic economy.
The real truth is that, in these advanced days, a contrast might well be drawn between the care and sense of personal responsibility people manifest in getting their clothes washed and the easy-going confidence and careless irresponsibility with which they send their children to be educated. One reason for the difference is that they pay directly
