I can only touch on one point more. I may be told that the effect of encouraging all girls, who display strength of character or intellectual power above the average, to make themselves pecuniarily independent, and to devote their energies to some special and definite occupation which will call forth their powers, will be to make them too absorbed or unwilling to enter upon marriage, and that the next generation must suffer from the strongest and most intellectual women holding aloof from wifehood and motherhood. Others, on the other hand, may say that their work will suffer, because the expectation of marriage will hinder them from doing their best. The latter objection will not, I think, be supported by those who are acquainted with the work of women graduates. There is much truth in the former one. Women who have been trained for a special work, and who like their work, either do not marry at all or marry comparatively late in life, and it may at first sight seem injurious to the race that this should be so. But I think this is a mistake. The men and women of the most marked individuality do not make the best husbands and wives, especially if they marry before they have become aware of their own character. Although a theory prevails to the contrary, I believe that women come to intellectual maturity later than men. They have a magnificent power of self-deception, of persuading themselves that they think and believe the things which those they care for think and believe--they are so little encouraged to think for themselves that many a woman, married when but a girl, has later on discovered that she has a character of her own, hitherto unrevealed to herself and unsuspected by her husband. Marriage, as George Eliot has said, must be a relation of sympathy or of conquest. But such women, if sympathy has not really existed between them and their husbands, are never conquered; they may be slaves or rebels, but never loyal subjects; and history is full of records of the disastrous early marriages of clever women. On the other hand, Hannah More, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Caroline Herschell, Harriet Martineau, all women of brilliant intellect, have left their mark on history as good and happy women; and we can all of us give a long list of such bright and contented lives from the unmarried women of our own acquaintance who have found their vocation. If they have missed the best in life, they have always been true to themselves. The economic independence of women is as necessary to men’s happiness as to women’s. Their true interests can never be opposed or antagonistic, however much those of an individual man and woman may be. There is no hardship to women in working for a living; the hardship lies in not getting a living when they work for it. And the great temptation from which all women should most earnestly strive to be freed is that which presents itself to so many at one time or