Men and women are wonderfully alike after all. The same motives move them, the same incitements spur to honorable effort, and if a girl is assured that, being half-educated, half-educated she must remain, she will not, unless driven by the internal fire of irrepressible genius, try very earnestly to fit herself for the higher plane which she can never reach. "Were it not better done, as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?" By all means it were far better, if effort for broader work be of no avail, to cease to think of it, and to make one's self as comfortable as possible. And yet, how about the comfort in the coming years, when her girls, who, thanks to the inevitable march of Truth, will have a better chance than she, and her boys, to whom the last stage of education is to be had for the asking, come to her in vain for sympathy and appreciation, to say nothing of the husband, from all understanding of whose rational thought she finds herself barred out?[19] Babies and half-educated children are very pretty to play with, interesting to watch, and delightful to care for, but when they are married and have children, for they can never be said, in any true sense, to be wives or mothers, they appear in a somewhat different aspect. I have sometimes, out of sheer pity, wished that there were some State asylum for such children, when they are left, as the chances of life and death so often leave them, unprotected in the world, with dependent children clinging to their useless hands. I have never seen a sadder sight than such a woman, her physical system in perfect order and superbly developed, looking stunned and helpless into the world, unable to do anything for herself or her children, and dependent upon the charity of her dead husband's friends--and perhaps the wise thought and tender care of a faithful servant, whose practical education was complete in the stern school of necessity--for food, clothing, and shelter. They have been only half-educated, and it seems as if the authority which has refused in the past to provide them with the power for their own maintenance, ought to recognize their right to be supported; as much as it does recognize the duty of supporting others, for whose education it has failed properly to care in their youth, in jails, penitentiaries, and prisons.