142 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

-and feathers in tlieir hats, often also to eat meat. This
--of course is pure snobbery : but since * Christian influence *
-not education, is the aim, these things must be provided ;

• and it often happens that these bourgeois ideals are the
•teachers' very own.

The teaching of mere accomplishments to all girls,
irrespective of talent, is in the West, to be correlated with
-•the overstocked matrimonial market; piano-playing and
foreign languages were supposed to attract the average
man. In the East, the matrimonial market is not over-
stocked. Most of the girls in Christian boarding schools
-are recruited from the villages ; they will not be called to
. any station in life different from that in which they were
born; for them the first essential of education should be to

• fit them for the life they will assuredly lead, that of the
mother of a family. But still accomplishments attract ;

..piano-playing, crewel-work and English manners (or the
lack of them) here also contribute to matrimonial bargains,
and so the village parent is content to take some risks.

f Take on the other hand the case of the cultured man with

• daughters whom he desires to educate in the best way, and
who understands what education means. I think of one
such, a learned Hindu, a Cambridge graduate, who has

• travelled with his wife in Europe, and is intellectually the
superior of all his associates in the Civil Service. There is

. as yet no Hindu school for girls where modern education
is available ; he does not wish to send them far away to
Mysore or to England ; and so he too sends his daughters

. as they grow up, one by one, to the 0. M. S. Ladies'

• College, where they are duly prepared for the Cambridge
Locals, taught Christian dogma,, French, fancy work and
the piano, besides the English mathematics and other sub-

. jects of value for which they really go. Out of school he