“We are of course all familiar with the view that education is threefold, that it concerns itself with moral, intellectual, and physical welfare. But there was a strength and elasticity in Miss Buss’ feeling about school education as all-embracing that marked it as more than the consequence of a view. Each girl was a clearly imagined whole to her, with whose deficiencies and needs she had the mother’s no less than the teacher’s sympathy. She was wonderfully patient, and sympathetic, too, with foolish mothers, of whom there are some. She had a kind word and thought for ‘fads,’ strenuously as she resisted them. Forty years—thirty years—ago, the ‘fads’ that had to be resisted were many indeed. “So she taught us, her teachers, the duty of infinite pains, infinite hope in the training of character. She never gave a girl up as hopeless. If one way failed, then another must be found. She had great belief—a belief well justified by facts—in the salvation of character by way of the rousing of intellectual interests. It was curious to note how a naughty girl improved if she grew to like her lessons. Naughtiness is often unsteadiness of will, and intellectual discipline is a steadying influence. Irrationality, moreover, is the cause of much moral evil, and thoughtful study makes for rationality. It may be—I am much disposed to think it is—that intellectual training effects greater moral improvement in women than it does in men, because a woman’s faults of character, on an average, turn more on irrationality and lack of nerve control, while the man’s faults centre in his profounder self-absorption and slower sympathies. “Character as the prime aim of education soon became the key-note of the North London practice. It fell in with this that great attention should be paid to punctuality, accuracy, order, method, and the cultivation of the clerkly business abilities generally. Nor should we forget that simple quality of respect for property, so despised of boys, on which the head-mistress laid much stress as essential for girls, and, indeed, a part of honesty. In very early days, girls spilt ink on their dresses, so ink ceased to be part of the regular school furniture, and is only given out when required, e.g. for examinations, by the mistress in charge of the form. It is part of the tradition of the place—a tradition that will now be a tender memory—that the giving out of the ink is a serious responsible act, the weight of which should never be thrown on a monitor or even a prefect. The spilling of the ink is an evil so great that its risk should be laid only on the shoulders of authority. But, seriously, this is symbolic of the leading idea that the duty of taking proper care of the furniture should be taught at school as well as at home.