Minds endowed with common sense are an aristocracy among the "average," and if this quality of theirs is lifted above the ordinary round of business and trained in the domain of thought it becomes a sound and wide practical judgment.

It will observe a great sobriety in its dealings with the abstract; the concrete is its kingdom, but it will rule the better for having its ideas systematized, and its critical power developed.

Self-diffidence tends to check this unduly, and it has to be strengthened in reasonably supporting its own opinion which is often instinctively true, but fails to find utterance.

It is a help to such persons if they can learn to follow the workings of their own mind and gain confidence in their power to understand, and find some intellectual interest in the drudgery which in every order of things, high or low, is so willingly handed over to their good management.

These results may not be showy, but it is a great thing to strengthen an "average" person, and the reward of doing so is sometimes the satisfaction of seeing that average mind rise in later years quite above the average and become a tower of steady reflection; while to itself it is a new life to gain a view of things as a whole, to find that nothing stands alone, but that the details which it grasps in so masterly a manner have their place and meaning in the scheme of the universe.
It is evident that even this elementary knowledge cannot be given in the earliest years of the education of girls, and that it is only possible to attempt it in schools and school-rooms where they can be kept on for a longer time of study.