I had also some opportunity to see the "Oriental organization of woman" under process of mental culture, in schools something like our own. Especially anxious to learn all that pertained to progress in education in the old cities in the East, I sought every opportunity to visit schools, Mahometan, Christian, and Jewish, under the old or under the more modern _régime_, and at the risk of being set down as a true American inquisitor, I pressed questions in every direction that would be likely to be suggested to a practical teacher, studying the problem we are here trying to solve: "What is the best education for our American girls?"
The best schools that I visited are those established within twelve or twenty years some, quite recently, by the Prussian Protestant Sisters or Deaconesses, who have had a rare and severe training for their work--physical, mental, and hygienic. In these schools, also, are to be found pupils from the better classes of the people, though they often have an orphan department attached, into which the neglected and wretched children are received, kindly cared for, and educated. In the opinion of these teachers, mental development is the source of health to their pupils, and they invariably spoke of the improving health and vigor of their girls under school training. They come, often, miserable and sickly from the neglect or abuse of ignorant mothers. Many such were growing healthy. The inert were growing active and playful, the deformed, greatly improving. One teacher said that to see the girls under her care inclined to any active play, until they had been in school months, sometimes years, was very rare. This inertness was more difficult to overcome in girls from the higher than the lower classes, for, in addition to an inert physical organization, a contempt for labor, with which they associated all exertion whatever, was born with them; and only through a long course of training--not until their brains began to take in the meaning and pleasure of study--could they throw it off; To rouse a girl and find out what she looked forward to in life, she had often asked her, "And what do you intend to _do_ when you leave school?" "Oh, sit," had been many times the answer she had received. "Sit," which meant, she said, to wait and get married.