And when the higher education of women has flowered under Catholic influence, it has had a strong basis of moral worth, of discipline and control to sustain the expansion of intellectual life; and without the Church the higher education of women has tended to one-sidedness, to nonconformity of manners, of character, and of mind, to extremes, to want of balance, and to loss of equilibrium in the social order, by straining after uniformity of rights and aims and occupations.
So with regard to the general question of women's higher education may it be suggested that the moral training, the strengthening of character, is the side which must have precedence and must accompany every step of their education, making them fit to bear heavier responsibilities, to control their own larger independence, to stand against the current of disintegrating influences that will play upon them.

To be fit for higher education calls for much acquired self-restraint, and unfortunately it is on the contrary sometimes sought as an opening for speedier emancipation from control.

Those who seek it in this spirit are of all others least fitted to receive it, for the aim is false, and it gives a false movement to the whole being.

Again, when it is entirely dissociated from the realities of life, it tends to unfit girls for any but a professional career in which they will have--at great cost to their own well-being--to renounce their contact with those primeval teachers of experience.
In some countries they have found means of combining both in a modified form of university life for girls, and in this they are wiser than we.
Buds of the same tree have been introduced into England, but they are nipped by want of appreciation.

We have still to look to our foundations, and even to make up our minds as to what we want.