one of authority on the one side and subordination on the other. The law of husband and wife goes on the principle that there can only be one head to the family, and that the husband is the proper head. In the traditions on which our common law is founded, it has been recognised that it is idle to rely for the maintenance of this relation on merely moral considerations. The possession of property is the practical instrument by which moral superiority is asserted. If a woman has her own property, and can apply to her separate use her own earnings, she is practically emancipated from the control of her husband. Provided, for instance, she has property of her own, or can earn her living, what is to prevent her from going where she likes and doing what she pleases? Of course, it may be said that the general rights of the husband over the wife are protected by law. This may be an available remedy for those wealthy classes with whom Mr. Shaw Lefevre does not concern himself: but of what use would it be to the poor ? Under the existing law, says Mr. Shaw Lefevre, it is a hardship that if a poor woman wants protection for her property she must go to a Court of Equity. Under his innovation, if a man wishes to enforce his claim over an erratic wife he would have no resource but a suit for the restitution of conjugal rights. In fact, Mr. Shaw Lefevre's plan would make poor men and women perfectly independent of each other, except so far as they were mutually concerned for their children; and we are sorry to say that in cases were the husband or the wife proves "reckless, improvident, vicious, self-indulgent, drunken, or even only unfortunate," this generally constitutes a very inadequate bond of union. Mr. Shaw Lefevre's change, therefore, would annihilate the existing relation between husband and wife not only among the wealthy, but among the well-conducted poor, in the hope of affording some alleviation in cases which no law can relieve from misery. He would cut away the ground of a vast estate in order to improve some ill-constructed houses on it; he would undermine the foundation of the whole edifice in the hope of strengthening a partial weakness.-Times.

INDEED, the present system of settlement goes farther than the new law could well go, because the settled property of a wife is now tied up to her in such a way that though she can receive and enjoy the profits of her income, she can no more touch or dispose of the capital than the husband; whereas under the new system no greater innovation than giving the control of her property to the wife as if she were single would be practicable. The wife would be free to give her property and earnings to her husband if she chose, which she cannot do now with regard to her settled property; or she would be free to keep and apply them in her own way. But what arrangement is to be made with respect to the husband's existing liability to maintain his wife and

pay her debts? Again, under the old law, if a wife be injured in person or property, she cannot sue for damages without her husband joining ; why should this disability be maintained when the other was done away with Assuredly, if a wife have a right to her property just the same as if she were single, à fortiori must she be entitled to receive for her own exclusive benefit, and consequently to sue for, any damages that may be due to her in respect of an injury to her person. The right to sue necessarily involves the correlative liability of being sued by herself and in her own name in actions of tort as well as in actions of debt, so that, in her legal relations, the effect of the new law must ultimately be to approximate the position and character of a married woman very nearly, if not entirely, to that of a spinster or widow.Morning Post.

THE most patent objections to the Bill are that it is ill-timed, and that it is introduced by a private member, who has neither official duty nor ripe experience to warrant his interference. The present parliament, one would think, has enough work already on its hands in the Irish Church and the Bankruptcy Bill, to say nothing of a score or so of other subjects of more or less urgency which it would be exceedingly desirable to despatch in the course of the session, though it is exceedingly likely that they will all be thrown over till next year. To bring in, at such a time as the present, such a Bill as that to which Mr. Lefevre stands sponsor, is simply to waste part of the short remainder of the session in purposeless discussion of a subject which must of necessity give rise to many a protracted debate, on the balancing of inconveniences which it will involve. We do not mean to say that we regard the present law as perfect, but we are sure its imperfections are not to be remedied by the hasty adoption of a Bill introduced by a private member, and in the last months of an expiring parliament. -Standard.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE.-Petitions in favour of woman suffrage were presented on May 14, by Mr. Mill (with 21,757 signatures); by Sir. H. F. Davie from Jedburgh; by Mr. P. A. Taylor from Folkestone; and Mr. McLaren, from the counties of Perth, Berwick, Forfar, Aberdeen, and Kirkwall, town of New Castleton and Blairgowrie.

THE movement in favour of high-class female education is extending itself in Scotland. Professor Nichol, of Glasgow University, is about to open an English literature class for ladies next session. It would be strange were the Scotch University towns to lag behind the English manufacturing towns in such a work.

ESTHETIC WOMAN.-Bold as the assumption sounds, it is quietly assumed that every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the assumption moulds the very course of female existence. The morning is spent in practising, and the evening in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the schoolroom overhead. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano explains the necessity. Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted without much trouble over music on the usual principles of female criticism. 66 Pretty" and "exquisite" go a great way with the Italian and the romantic schools; "sublime" does pretty universally for the German. The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming of social lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be a very heavy guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the flower song or the jewel scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness of it all, echo the confusion within woman herself. Moreover, there is no boredom-no absolute appeal to thought or deeper feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the "Fidelio" of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask, without hope of an answer, why ninetenths of our modern songs are written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher. But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that æsthetic creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot

play good music, and can play bad. There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the patronage of musical woman is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experience that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and when these purposes are attained, she throws good music and bad music aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed one resigns her sway over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to do. Her rôle in life has no need of accomplishments; and as for the serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty to it, that is the business of "professional people," and not of British mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.

Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive form govern the whole æsthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance, dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution, not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder. Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians, the rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children upstairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children downstairs in the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a hundred "potboilers," while man can only give him an order for a single "Light of the World." One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning demonstration of her æsthetic faculties meets us on every festival in wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars

turned into grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which the decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticisms of cousins who have looked in accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical purposes which æsthetic woman never forgets. Were she, indeed, once to forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a Georges Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving and studying art for its own sake-solitary, despised, eccentric, and blue. From such a destiny æsthetic woman turns scornfully away-Saturday Review.

FEMALE EDUCATION IN INDIA.-Mr. Manockjee Cursetjee, whose name is so honourably connected with the efforts made to promote female education in India, addressed the following letter to Sir Stafford Northcote, and has requested us to give publicity to the same. RIGHT HONOURrable Sir,

1. I venture respectfully to request your perusal of the accompanying printed correspondence, reports, and papers on the subject of Female Education in India, and the establishment of "The Alexandra Native Girls' English Institution" at Bombay.

2. The consequences that must eventually result from the success of such an institution are so obvious that I will not trespass upon your time by their recapitulation. Suffice it to say that the result involves not only a radical change in the mental, moral, and social condition of the people of India, but likewise the consolidation of the British empire, by the confirmation of their allegiance to a government paternally and evidently anxious for their improvement and welfare.

3. It has been, you will be pleased to observe, my constant aim and unremitting endeavour, for upwards of a quarter of a century, to found or see founded an institution that should have for its object the introduction of the English education among our female population (having given it a successful trial in my own family), on such a liberal and comprehensive basis, prudently and cautiously engrafted, as would gradually diminish native prejudice and dislike to European civilisation, and at length take root and become acclimatised amongst them.

4. It would be an endless task to describe how much this idea was scouted; what prejudice, difficulties, calumny, and even insults I had to contend with and submit to; and how long I stood alone in my advocacy of an idea long deemed impracti cable, if not insane. But Providence in its goodness enabled me to witness my efforts, though humble and single, crowned with success; and some of my com. patriots, who stood long opposed to me, came round to my way of thinking, that the English system of education was preferable to their own, and co-operated with me and became my collaborators in founding "The Alexandra Native Girls' English Institution" at Bombay.

5. The institution was started with sixty thousand rupees, which I had a reasonable prospect of being able to double, and I placed a part of my residence (Villa