Borne thither in her litter, or proceeding on foot, accompanied by her slaves, our Pompeian lady spent hours in the women's part of the establishment, whence she could either depart by a side-door, as privately as she came, or mix in the crowd in the courts.

Roman luxury resulted in diminishing the population; for in the higher classes a numerous family was looked upon as a misfortune rather than a blessing, as tending to divide the large fortunes and estates. Still, marriage was regarded as the inevitable destiny and only future for a woman, but it was generally a marriage of convenance, brought about and arranged by the parents; and this, we may be sure, was the case in a commercial and agricultural town like Pompeii, full of rich land-proprietors, ship-owners, and merchants, who

them by the foreign merchants; in giving orders to the goldsmiths and silversmiths and workers in bronze for jewels and household utensils; in choosing a propitious time and day for the wedding, for which the whole of February and May was considered unlucky, while many days permissible for the re-marriage of widows were prohibited to maidens. Instead of the white veil, so inseparably associated in our minds with the eventful day, the Pompeian bride wore one dyed a saffron colour, matching that of her shoes. The marriage ceremony was merely a civil contract and mutual consent before two or more witnesses, and no religious ceremony blessed the union. But at eve the bride, whose hair during her toilet had been parted with the point of a sword or spear, and who held a distaff in her

HEN a profession is easily learnt, or, at all events, easily practised; when it requires neither apprenticeship nor capital, and when success in it is nevertheless fairly well rewarded, we are all of us, I am afraid, apt to say: "What a capital opening for the employment of women!" Unfortunately, however, the women are of the same opinion, and thus the opening is promptly closed to nine hundred and ninety-nine of those whose hopes were raised, by the mob of a thousand applicants for every vacancy. Women in want of employment, like men, naturally think of their own chances of success first, and of the interests or needs of the community at most secondly. But even from the candidates' point of view, there is evidently something to be said for any calling in which there exists a ready-made demand for women's work, and, moreover, a demand which is always rather in excess of the supply, just because the calling cannot be

entered by anybody at a moment's notice, without qualification or training.

The very finest of the careers recently opened to women-the practice of medicine-answers to this description, and it is noticeable that the first and strongest argument in favour of opening it was, not that it would be nice and easy for girls to be doctors, but that sick women and children would be saved some suffering, if they could have their disorders treated by competent women surgeons and physicians.

Now, it would be rash to recommend the career of an elementary schoolmistress as a nice, easy way for girls to get their own living; only this may be said with confidence, that any girl of ordinary cultivation and intelligence who cares to acquire the necessary technical qualifications, will begin with a good start towards that part of the profession where there is always plenty of room, viz., at the top, and will, from the first, find employment easily, because there are more millions of children needing to be taught the rudiments, than there

are hundreds of thousands of women with the desirable degree of instruction and refinement ready to teach them.

The first suggestion that ladies should be employed as elementary schoolmistresses originated with the friends. of voluntary schools, notably those connected with the Church of England, and a training college was founded with a special view to the desirability of enticing clergymen's daughters and others similarly predisposed to qualify for the profession. Since 1870, however, the need for good schoolmistresses has been most strongly felt by School Boards, with their formidable numbers of undisciplined scholars; and at the same time the Boards are able, and by the exigencies of the market, compelled, to pay the highest salaries for their more arduous work, while interfering less with the private independence of their staff than is natural and usual in small denominational schools. The demand for the services of women is thus most urgent, exactly where the work is least easy. The founders of the Chichester Training College thought that some of the girls who were accustomed to "take a class," or teach as amateurs in the village school, would be easily persuaded to pass a few examinations, after which they might act as mistresses in similar schools either at home or abroad. But this ideal is seldom realised, if for no other reason, because in parsonages, as in most other English homes, however limited the income, parents are loth to prepare, till it is too late, for the chance of their daughters having to make their own way in the world. It is also probable that the social gulf between the parsonage and the school-house yawns most widely in the imagination of the ci-devant occupants of the parsonage, so that, on the whole, there is no special reason to expect the daughters of the clergy to be more drawn towards this special form of industry than those of the laity.

We may approach the question, then, as quite an open one, to be considered from three sides. First, what the community has to gain by securing for its poorest children teachers of a status higher than that of the average pupil-teacher; secondly, what are the drawbacks and attractions of the profession as compared with others open to women of the more fastidious classes; and thirdly, how it is best approached by those who are more susceptible to its attractions than its drawbacks. The first effect of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was to double the demand for mistresses in comparison with that for masters, besides increasing it absolutely in the same way. Not merely had schools to be built and staffed for all the boys and girls who were known to be out of school, but the existing provision, even when sufficient for the boys of a neighbourhood, was almost always inadequate for the girls and infants. This was natural enough so long as schools were built only for the children who were sent spontaneously, the boys attending pretty well, the girls very badly, and the babies hardly at all. It was not an unusual provision for a large parish to have a school accommodating 300 boys, 200 girls, and 100 infants. There would thus be about the same number of men and women teachers employed in all. Compulsion generally doubled the total numbers, but it added on the average perhaps 100 boys, 200 girls, and

300 infants to the roll, increasing the demand for masters 25 per cent., and that for mistresses nearly 70 per cent. Before compulsion was applied, it was mostly the well-to-do and respectable parents who sent their children to school, and of these a certain number, who were fairly bright and painstaking, stayed on as monitors or pupil-teachers, and ultimately became certificated teachers, if their parents were able and willing to make some pecuniary sacrifices to launch them in a profession which was considered even more genteel than dressmaking. parents, however, cannot afford to let their girls wait so long to earn full wages, still less can they find the £20 or so needed for expenses at a training college; and as it is the poorest elementary schools that have increased most in numbers, the number of eligible pupil-teachers provided by the elementary schools has not increased in proportion with the demand for qualified teachers.

Poor

The provision of training colleges for women is also entirely inadequate, and the untrained ex-pupil-teacher is, as a rule, quite unfitted for any but the most subordinate position. The name "training college" is unfortunate and misleading, because it suggests an institution in which persons of competent knowledge shall be instructed in the art of teaching; while their use is in fact the very opposite. The pupil-teachers during their apprenticeship learn by practice and from the head teacher how to keep order and impart to younger children all the little knowledge they themselves possess, but while their whole time is taken up in teaching and learning lessons, they have no chance of acquiring any rudiments of a really liberal education, and for the most part they come from homes where books are few and conversation certainly not so literary as to supply the place of books. The two years spent in the so-called training college, though too often wasted in dreary cram, is thus the only chance the average teacher enjoys of leisure for thought and self-improvement. And the general level of education is higher among elementary schoolmasters than mistresses, exactly because a much larger proportion of them have passed through a training college. There are not, however, nearly training colleges enough to receive all the teachers wanted year by year in the elementary schools. Admission to the colleges is viewed as a sort of scholarship, and amongst those who go up yearly for the examination, only those who pass well in the first or second division can count on finding room. The remaining thousand or more of comparative dunces are not excluded from the profession, but condemned to go on practising it without the interval for private study, which might enable them to practise it with credit and success. One of the most comical bits of official optimism ever published at the public expense was the annual observation in the Blue-book of the Education Office, that these inefficient teachers were very useful to poor voluntary schools, which were able to get them cheap! Half the complaints of over-pressure upon teachers and scholars, and all the complaints of mechanical and unintelligent teaching, made with reason against our present educational system, are due to the fatal blunder of setting teachers to impart knowledge which they have not acquired.