Our extensive and our expanding system of higher education of women is often bitterly assailed by educated men, by educators. Bourbonism, especially when bulwarked by vanity, does not yield easily. And it will be many a day before death reaps the last man with the passion for looking down on his fellow-creatures. To avoid useless dispute, admit that woman should look up to man. Still there remains unimpaired the truth that woman’s two highest functions are to be the companion of man and the mother of men. The profitable companion for an educated man must be an educated woman--educated not merely for man’s “hours of ease,” nor for his happily infrequent hours “when pain and anguish rack the brow,” but also for the hours of development and endeavor. So long as so-called education consisted in a little Latin and less Greek, forgotten as speedily as the business of life could crowd it from the mind, higher education was as unimportant to women as--well, as it was to man. But now that education consists in teaching not how the Greeks and Romans lived, but how “you and I” must live to-day and to-morrow, the gap between the man who has had the higher education and the woman who has not had it and has not supplied the deficiency, is wide indeed and will grow wider. If as much attention were given to the relations between men and women from five years after marriage on to the end as is given to their relations during the purely sentimental and transitory mating season this difference would appear in its true importance. The same point of view applies to woman as a mother. So long as the training of children centred around the slipper and the switch, an ignorant mother was not at a great disadvantage--the best educated mothers knew little. But now-a-days the child of the highly educated mother has an enormous advantage, other things being equal, because such a mother applies science to the conduct of her home as her husband applies it to the conduct of his profession or business. No education in the mother will compensate for lack of character. Character without education is infinitely better than education without character. But character plus education is the true ideal--and it is attainable. If we are speedily to enter more fully into the rich promised land which Democracy opens to us, we must have not only the man who knows but the woman who knows. After all, is not our ultimate excuse for being alive that we are the parents of the next generation? And there the woman, with practically absolute control over the next generation at its vital, formative age, has the better of the man. If anything, does she not need the higher education more than does the man? Education for the men; education for the women. But it must be _enlightened and enlightening_ education.