and training.

Therefore we hope that education among us will be made compulsory for girl and boy alike, after the example of the advanced Western countries, lest we lose the benefit we could reap if learning spread among all the individuals of the people: its poor and its rich.

The revolution that fermented in secret in the souls of the past generation had a manifest effect in turning the point of view on the matter of the girl's education. Its influence has appeared in the present generation, and in the changing of woman's condition — a total change which, no doubt, still calls for reform and refinement.

But it promises well and invites optimism. Here is the girl walking beside the boy at the stage of higher education, after she had been content with the merest scrap of it. And here is woman bestirring herself for works of charity and reform in the various women's associations.

And the revolution that has overturned most of the conditions touching woman in Europe and America — this unbridled revolution — will doubtless have its effective part in overturning our own settled conditions. We must therefore look ahead to it, preparing the girl to accept only its results and its whole-some requirements, lest recklessness harm us and drag us into ruinous states from which there is no release.

Ali ibn Abi Talib, may God honor his countenance, said: "A man remains learned so long as he seeks learning; when he supposes that he has learned, he has become ignorant."

Therefore we hope that the girl will not take incomplete learning as a means of display, a mount for vainglory, and a ladder for climbing to a station better than that of her generation. Rather we want from the

fields of learning a motive force for our latent powers — powers which, in woman in our country, still show only a small, local activity that is not in harmony with the world's wakefulness, and does not keep pace with the life opening in the breasts of men throughout the world and the burning wakefulness in their minds and brains.

The woman who in our country has come to share with man his stages of education must also share with him in the work of building an independent national existence in its vital domains. For the aim of learning is not confined to mere paralyzed, mute knowledge; it is the spirit that gives life to work, speech to matter, language to art, and activity and ardor to all the powers buried in the depths of man.

Still waters grow stagnant; motion is the order of existence; retreat is passing away and loss; and stagnation is death and inevitable extinction.

Woman still falls short in the field of scientific production, by comparison with man, in the various countries of the world. Perhaps this goes back to what her natural life demands of keeping to the house and caring for the children. For experience has shown that when she comes down into the arena she is man's equal in every fruitful scientific work. But experience has also shown that every lagging behind, in whatever field it may be, brings defeat and loss, and every one-sided truce brings humiliation and abandonment.

We hope, then, that our renaissance will rest on the joint activity of woman and man for learning, that it may be a beacon for us in the work of reform desired for our people and for all humanity.