The contrasts existing between girls’ education as it was in 1865 and thirty years later must have been brought very forcibly before Miss Beale when, in 1894, she was again asked to give evidence before a Royal Commission. The chairman of this was Mr. Bryce, who had himself inspected and reported for the Taunton Commission of 1864-7. The composition of this later body marked the advance that had been made. Of its seventeen members three were women. Well might Miss Beale say that the changes she had witnessed were ‘inconceivably great.’ Her own position was changed. On the first occasion she had merely been the able representative of a little known and rather despised class of workers. On the second she came as one of the recognised leaders of a band whose work was becoming yearly more valuable and more important. Miss Beale was first questioned on the co-operation and co-relation of different schools in one neighbourhood. She expressed herself in favour of the co-operation of teachers, not of unity in governing bodies, ‘because one governing body is rather apt to generalise and say that everything that is suitable for boys should be done for girls.’ She was also careful to say that there must be a supreme authority in each school. One point of special interest to-day is the discussion which took place on the teaching of the classics to girls. Miss Beale, as has been shown, was never in favour of teaching either Latin or Greek to young girls, and she maintained her objections on this occasion. She thought it a mistake to begin Greek at the age of eleven or twelve, though she admitted that it was easier to learn than Latin. ‘But children,’ she said, ‘do not enter into the delicacies and refinements of the Greek language, ... and they get tired of it.... I do not think the most intelligent teacher could make a child like the intricacies of grammar early.’[85] Miss Beale does not seem to have mentioned one reason why she would not teach Latin early until, in 1898, she wrote in _Work and Play_: ‘I feel strongly that Latin should, however, properly come after German, specially for girls. There is a pestilential atmosphere in the Campania, and one needs to have one’s moral fibre braced by the poetry of the Hebrews and of England and Germany, if one would remain unaffected by writings saturated with heathen thought.’