development he failed to recognize the importance of cultivating his women. All peoples, in their progress toward civilization and while yet afar off, have been in the dark on this point. Even the benefactors of the race, the philanthropists who so generously aided the cause of education among us, by their own example fostered this idea of the comparative unimportance of educating the women of the race. The mistake was in not measuring the negro by the same standard applied to other peoples. Our only educational need was thought to be that of educated ministers, and even they were educated often in theology at the expense of spelling and grammar.
For a long time the idea held sway among us that it did not "pay" to spend much time and money in schooling the girls. "They made no use of their education," was affirmed, unless, indeed, they taught for a year or two, after which they resigned to marry. So the woman who might have become the mother* of a Bacon or a Newton, or who might have blossomed into a George Eliot or a Mrs. Browning, was left with dormant intellect and unexpanded energies to grope her way in darkness, unwitting even of all she had missed.
Our poverty, too, has been, and even is, a strong force to repress ambition and to thwart the desire for a broad and liberal culture. Woman's role has ever been that of self-sacrifice. It has seemed to her right and natural that all the available funds of the family should be lavished on the son in college, even though some of it was spent in useless little extravagances, while the sisters at
