One hundred years ago the education of women in the most progressive and wealthy families went little beyond reading and writing. In 1819, when Mrs. Emma Willard issued an address to the members of the New York legislature advocating the endowment of an institution for the higher education of women, there was not a college in the country for girls. In 1892, the colleges of the United States numbered more than 50,000 female students. In 1888, the ratio of female students to the whole number of students pursuing a higher course of education in universities and colleges in this country was 29.3 per centum, or a little more than one fourth. At the same time the ratio in England was 11 per centum; in France, 2 per centum; while in Germany, Austria, and Italy the ratio was so slight as to be but a mere fraction of 1 per centum. Such a thing as a female president of a college was unknown and probably undreamed of in the eighteenth century; but we learn from the Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1887–88 that there are in the United States forty-two colleges and institutions for the superior instruction of women having a woman for president. In the high and secondary schools, in 1888, over one half of the students were girls. And in the same year, tabulated statistics reveal that 63 per centum of the teachers were women. And this percentage will become greater and greater as we grasp the truth that woman is, by gift of greater intuition and sympathy, the natural instructor of the human race. The salaries paid to women teachers are grossly unfair when compared to the pay of male teachers for the same or less work. But as the difference in compensation is growing smaller every decade, there is at least room for hope that this injustice will soon be righted. The law of evolution is the discoverer and formulator of woman’s advancement. The invention and use of gunpowder placed the peasant on an equal war-footing with the mailed knight. The enormous increase in mechanical appliances and productive machinery has taken woman out of the rank of unpaid menials, has given her leisure for mental development, opportunity to receive recompense for toil, and is largely breaking down the physical barriers which had hitherto been considered unsurmountable. Statistics show that there are forms of machinery in the operation of which the production of a woman is even greater than that of a man, thus furnishing an actual proof of the falsity of the idea that woman is incapacitated for competition with man in the physical world. And the trend of events is indicated by the statistics given in the Report of the Commissioner of Labor, from which we learn that in some trades and professions the percentage of women engaged has increased fivefold in the last decade.