"Still another evil in American women is the want of any general appreciation of art in its nobler phases. The number of those who visit the museums of art is wretchedly small, compared with the crowds in the temples of haberdashery. Even the love of art they have is tainted with 'Parisian fashions.' The painting which makes fortunes is not the worthy representation of worthy subjects; French boudoir paintings take the place of representations of what is grand in history or beautiful in legend; Wilhems and his satin dresses, Bourgereau with his knack at flesh-color, have driven out of memory the noble treatment of great themes by Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche; Kaulbach is eclipsed by Meissonier. Art is rapidly becoming merely a means of parlor decoration, and losing its function as the embodiment of great truths. "So rapidly evaporates one of the most potent influences for good in a republic. An education of women, looking to something more than accomplishments, is necessary to create a healthy reaction against this tendency. "Still another part of woman's best and noblest influence has an alloy which education of a higher sort, under influences calculated to develop logical thought, might remove. For one of the most decided obstacles to progress of the best Christian thought and right reason has arisen from the clinging of women to old abuses, and the fear of new truths. From Mary Stuart, at the castle of Ambroise, to the last good woman who has shrieked against science--from the Camarilla which prays and plots for reaction in every European court down to the weakest hunter of the mildest heresies in remote villages, the fetichisms and superstitions of this world are bolstered up mainly by women. "In Lessing's great picture, the good, kind-faced woman whose simplicity Huss blesses as she eagerly heaps up the fagots for his martyrdom, is but the type of vast multitudes of mothers of the race. "The greatest aid which could be rendered to smooth the way for any noble thinkers who are to march through the future, would be to increase the number of women who, by an education which has caught something from manly methods, are prevented from clinging to advancing thinkers, or throwing themselves hysterically across their pathway. "So, too, that indirect influence of women on political events, so lauded even by those who are most opposed to any exercise by her of direct influence, has some bad qualities which a better system of education might diminish. The simple historical record shows that in what Bacon calls the 'insanity of states,' her influence has generally been direful. From Catherine de Medicis in the struggle of the League, down to Louise Michel, in the recent catastrophe at Paris--from the _tricoteuses_ of the first French Revolution to the _petroleuses_ of the last, woman has seemed to aggravate rather than soothe popular fury. Nor is the history of civil strife nearer home, without parallel examples.