This general advance all over the civilised world is the chief gain this half century has brought to women’s education. Though each country has proceeded on its own lines the movement has unconsciously been an international one. That gives it a strength which will make it permanent. CHAPTER VIII BOARDING AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS Once more our chronicle takes us back to 1867. A new era was then inaugurated, that of girls’ day schools. Not that these were anything new; small cheap day-schools for girls abounded, but the majority of them were bad. With fees ranging from £3 to £10 a year, and pupils of every variety of age, a little simple arithmetic will prove that the mistress had not sufficient funds at her disposal to pay for suitable premises and adequate teaching, to say nothing of winning a modest competence for herself. From all parts of the country came condemnation of these small, cheap schools. The opinions about boarding-schools were by no means so unanimous. They were censured for the excessive attention given to accomplishments, the insufficient education of the teachers, and their neglect of physical training; but these were faults common to nearly all the schools of that day, and not characteristic of boarding-schools as such. A careful perusal of the Commissioners’ report leads to a far more favourable impression of boarding than day-schools, due, probably, to their being less hampered for funds. But the general public is influenced by impressions rather than facts; and certainly an impression did gain ground that a day-school was in itself a good and a boarding-school an evil. Unquestionably the reformers were right in first turning their attention to the former. Large schools of this kind were easier to organise, and really made for efficiency and economy, that much desired combination, which in this case is not, as so often, a mere contradiction in terms. The establishment of high and endowed schools has brought a good education within reach of thousands of girls who could by no other means have obtained it. The extinction of the small, cheap boarding-school which for the past century had been struggling to give the lower middle classes a poorer imitation of the poor education given elsewhere to their social ‘superiors,’ is a thing no one can seriously deplore. Painless extinction is, unhappily, impossible. The suffering which such changes bring in their train is to be deplored, but the article itself may be relegated to the class of those that ‘never will be missed.’