“St. Paul’s is the greatest prize in the profession, or rather would be if the scheme had become law. Do you see, the salary might be £2000 a year. _Ours_ is second, with a hundred more pupils, and therefore more work and less pay than St. Paul’s. My object in drawing up the list was to show the importance of training and high education for women-teachers. Such prizes are not to be had elsewhere. Look at Scotch girls’ schools, at German also. We women owe a deep debt to the Endowed School Commission.” The verdict given as the result of the Schools Inquiry Commission does not, of course, exclude the fact that there were then, and had always been, _some_ good private schools where a good education had been given. The true teacher, like the poet, “is born and not made,” the power to teach being as much a Divine gift as that of song or of painting. It is true that the perception of every gift must depend on its full culture, the extent of success being determined by the amount of genius; but there have always been born teachers, some self-educated and some developed by exceptional home surroundings. Women of this kind have always existed as the loved and honoured centres of exceptional influence, sending out pupils formed on their own model. Doubtless, there could have been found, at any period in the world’s history, a sufficient justification for the attitude condemned in one of the early papers in _Fraser_ on the then quite new Queen’s College:— ‘Educate the women!’ exclaimed an accomplished and excellent man in our hearing, and with marked surprise. ‘Where is the necessity? A college for ladies! Nonsense! Women are admirably educated! I see none but well-educated women around me!’ in the tone of a man who, when told of those who hunger for bread, should reply, ‘Want bread? Nonsense! Hunger! There is no such thing! I see a good dinner before me every day.’” But, granting that there was education, and of a real kind, we must agree that this, as a rule, was accessible only in the form of a very highly paid private governess, or in select and very expensive private schools. That even so much was not common, and not to be secured by the very highest payments, may be inferred from the account given by Miss Cobbe, in her “Autobiography,” of a typical fashionable school, where a two years’ course cost £1000, of which she says that “if the object had been to produce the minimum of result at the maximum of cost, nothing could have been better designed for the purpose.” In this school, she adds, “everything was taught in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were morals and religion, and at the top music and dancing.”