which girls, including those whom parents may reasonably hope to leave independently provided for, may derive from University Education. Incidentally this will lead to some consideration of women's work generally.
To begin with there are obviously two sides to the question. We must examine, on the one hand, what the Universities offer, and, on the other, what women want or ought to want before we can decide how far the two coincide.
John Stuart Mill, speaking of University Education in 1867 in an address at St. Andrews University, which produced a considerable effect at the time, said that a University "is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings." If this were strictly true, and if our actual Universities succeeded in any reasonable degree in carrying out this ideal, there could surely be no question that all men and all women whose circumstances made it possible should seek a University Education. It must be right for all to be, as human beings, as capable and cultivated as their opportunities allow.
But it hardly seems that Mill's view of University Education was completely in harmony with the facts even at the time it was put forward; and the development of University Study in the generation and a half that has elapsed since his address was delivered, has been in the opposite direction. At the age at which students now go to the Universities, the necessity of deciding on a profession, if they are to enter one, and of preparing specifically for it has usually come so near them that they cannot reasonably be expected to neglect the need of special preparation for after careers in the pursuit of general culture, and accordingly Universities in these days offer courses specially adopted for doctors, lawyers, engineers, farmers and so forth—not that they usually profess to
