management Boston is fast winning the place among American cities which Birmingham held in Britain in the seventies and Glasgow has attained in the nineties.

In other important cities of the States the same tendency is shown. At the last municipal election in Denver three-quarters of the votes cast were "against corporation control of the city," the elected Democratic candidate and the nominee of the Civic Federation both making water, gas, and tramways the chief issues. At Milwaukee the newly-elected mayor is committed to municipal ownership. Des Moines, Iowa, re-elected its mayor last year on the hard-fought issue of city tramways; and, in the constitution for San Francisco, which will come into force in January next, there is a special clause to expressly prohibit the renewal or regranting of existing monopolistic privileges.

The two facts, grave official corruption and a marked trend towards municipal socialism, which I have shown to distinguish American cities, will appear to the British citizen to be mutually exclusive. Representatives and officials who are financially clean he considers essential to extended city operations. First honesty, then larger But that order is impos

business, appears to be the proper order. sible in the States, because the private corporations which control the city services are a prime cause of the corruption. To secure special privileges they debauch councillors, aldermen, mayors, legislatures, and governors. One mayor was lately offered £10,000 by one company and a trip round the world for himself and his family by another if he would allow certain city ordinances to pass. A Governor of a large State was offered 20,000 shares in a company if he would sign a measure for increasing its privileges. He knew that his signature would probably increase the value of those shares by £120,000. His successor did sign the bill, and the shares rose in price even more than that amount. As Governor Pingree has said: "Good municipal government is an impossibility while valuable franchises are to be had and can be obtained by the corrupt use of money in bribing the public servants."

The companies deliberately adopt the policy of distributing shares to newspaper proprietors and editors and to city authorities who "are in a position to promote the welfare of our business." Therefore public interest usually clashes with private interest when a question of privilege or taxation arises. The companies are serenely content as to which will prevail.

Public ownership offers less temptation to jobbery and scoundrelism than the surrender of public services to private corporations. The alternative is not between honesty with private enterprise and dishonesty with public ownership, but between periodical and gigantic frauds along with the surrender of city property and the retention of

Neither

valuable rights at the risk of constant petty peculation. policy offers ideal conditions, but the preference is now in favour of the smaller thefts. It is cheaper for the city to lose small sums annually through the selection of workmen for political reasons than to remain in the grasp of private corporations who can levy exorbitant charges.

Also, reform of politics will be easier when the cities have ousted the companies. Rich and influential citizens, who, as investors, are now frequently interested in resisting reform, will then have only their interests as taxpayers to consider, and will, therefore, be more likely to demand efficient administration; while the rank and file of the voters will give greater attention to their city government when it affects their tram fares, gas and water Bills, and telephone charges. Therefore the trend towards city ownership is an evidence of a determination to continue the slow work of purification. As much as Civil Service Reform it "makes for righteousness."

J. W. MARTIN.

THE AGE LIMIT FOR WOMEN.

"Rather than remain braced and keen to watch the world accurately and take every appearance on its own merits, the lazy intellect declines upon generalisations, formalised rules and Laws of Nature."

"Idlehurst, a Journal kept in the Country."

VERY reader of the educational journals must be familiar with

EVER

the typical advertisement that "The Council of the High School for Girls will shortly appoint a Headmistress. No one over 35 need apply." The restriction produces an effect on assistantmistresses very prejudicial to the interests of education. Girls after a three or four years' University course, followed in some cases by a year in a Training College, have hardly settled down to the practical business of their lives in the high schools before they are seized with a nervous fear that if they do not shortly bestir themselves in the competition for headmistress-ships they will before long be stranded on this old-time superstition. Their youth and inexperience are facts constantly brought before them up to the age of thirty or thereabouts, and then with hardly an interval they find themselves confronted by this theory of sudden decay of faculties in women. During the second five years of teaching there is a constant agitation among young mistresses in the endeavour to secure a headship, and then amongst those who fail in the lottery-for it is a lottery-comes the deadening prospect of, perhaps, a quarter of a century's work to be carried on without hope of promotion.

It may be useful to consider the origin of this "formalised rule " that women are unfit to undertake serious responsibility after the age of thirty-five.

The rule―an advance, no doubt, on the eighteenth-century habit of referring to men and women of forty or fifty as "aged"-became stereotyped at least as early as the middle of this century. Unmarried ladies regarded as on the shelf at twenty-five were forced

to let their faculties die away for want of exercise. The freshness was drained out of them by the pressure of trivialities unresisted by hope. Those who entered the labour market did so as victims of cruel misfortune, full of pity for themselves and quickly worn out by their struggles to gain a livelihood with few qualifications for the task.

During the last twenty years a very striking change has made itself apparent. In some branches the extension of the working period of a woman's life has been so great that it has even brought back to useful, hopeful enterprise, women who had settled down to the colourless, dreary, monotonous round prescribed for the unattached elderly. The number of educated women who either earn a livelihood or engage in philanthropic work has not increased so much as is usually supposed, but the spirit in which the work is undertaken is wholly different. Not that it is in all respects a praiseworthy one. The disinterestedness of the saint is perhaps lacking. Indeed, what I wish to lay stress on as a fact for which to be thankful is that the period of youthful interestedness has been very greatly extended.

In fiction our women writers have long since abandoned sweet seventeen as a heroine, and even men writers, slowest of all to observe such changes, have, during the last five years or so, recognised that at that favoured age girls are nowadays too much absorbed in preparing for senior locals and college entrance examinations to offer useful material for romantic literature.

ago.

Not a few of our veterans shake their heads over what I have called the extension of youthfulness, but what they call the prolongation of childish irresponsibility. The crudeness of the girl-graduate of two or three and twenty is contrasted unfavourably with the finished manners and graceful maturity of the girl of eighteen, some forty years And there would be much to be urged in support of their disapproval if, with the raising of the age-limit of a girl's systematised education, there were no corresponding rise in the age-limit of their usefulness and energy. If the prime of life were necessarily passed at an age fixed for all time, so that the time spent in preparation for work was deducted from the time available for work itself, it might fairly be doubted whether our modern system of education was not positively harmful.

But there is no such fixity in the age at which maturity is attained, and there is reason to believe that as each generation takes longer to arrive at maturity, owing to much more careful attention to mental and physical development, so also each generation retains the possession of its mature powers for a longer period than the preceding

one.

Reflecting on this possibility and comparing modern systems of education with those prevailing a century ago, it will be noticed that

in those days girls became wives and mothers before they had had time to realise the joy of youth, that children were introduced to society too soon to have indulged in the delightful exercise of imagination, untouched by responsibility, and that toddling babies must have been taught to theorise on moral problems, judging by the period at which some of them attained to a reasoned self-control.

Looking back, too, with curiosity, to the methods by which this precocious maturity of judgment was produced, it is interesting to note the changes in the school curriculum apparent at different periods, and the absence of those subjects which, in our day, we regard as preliminary to education, and which yet require more years for their mastery than were necessary a hundred years ago for the mastery of feminine accomplishments and the acquisition of fixed moral principles.

It is those fixed moral principles that form the most marked characteristic of the eighteenth-century child. Of religious teaching there was strikingly little; religious fervour is almost entirely absent from the literature of the period. But moral teaching was, so far as girls were concerned, the only branch of study in which they were called to exercise their reason.

We are all of us apt to imagine that the writers of children's books in the last century had so little artistic faculty as to be constantly writing a language which no human being could ever have indulged in, in real life. But, in fact, these prematurely grown-up girls were never called on to exercise their intelligence on any subject except morals. They were twice as old as our children of the same age, but their brains were less accustomed to exercise than those of our infants in the kindergarten nowadays. The style in vogue was a natural result. Daniel Defoe, in his "Tour through Great Britain," describes the domestic system in the woollen industry in the West Riding at the beginning of the eighteenth century with glowing enthusiasm. I quote, from the edition of 1759, the account of the trade in Halifax and the surrounding district. After describing the scenery, he

goes on:

"Nor is the industry of the people wanting to second these advantages. Though we met few people without doors, yet within we saw the houses full of lusty fellows, some at the dye vat, some at the loom, others dressing the cloth; the women and children carding or spinning; all employed from the youngest to the oldest; scarce anything above four years old but its hands were sufficient for its own support."

There are other instances of a similar kind in other parts of the book. It is to him a delightful thing that there should be work enough for these little four-year-old mites to be able to relieve their parents from the burden of their support.