INTRODUCTION
I offer this little book (which aims at a reconstruction as faithful and accurate as careful research could achieve, of the real school-life and education of real little girls in many ages, and in many lands) to all those interested in the education of the Irish Girls of To-day—the women of a great and splendid To-morrow.
If it be true, as Cardinal Logue reminds us, that “A Nation is what its Women make its Men,” at no time was the question of the Education of her Girls of more importance to Ireland than it is now.
Is all well with that Education? By what test shall Ireland prove it?
As I write these words, there comes before me a memory of a wonderful little room, at the end of a Dresden Gallery, where the Sistine Madonna hangs beautiful and alone. Here, generation after generation of artists have come to gaze on that Miracle of Loveliness, and to test their own art by its perfection.
So, a little apart in the Gallery of the Scriptures hangs the immortal picture of the “Valiant Woman.” And it seemed to me, as I was writing of the Little Girls in my book, that I could see each age and each country coming to that picture as to a shrine, and trying to copy, each in its own medium, its untold perfection.
Do those who have charge of the Education of the Irish Girls of To-day stand often before that picture of the “Valiant Woman,” and do they try to reproduce her image?
If so, all is well with the Education of Ireland’s Girls—and all will be well with Ireland, the Nation.
HELENA CONCANNON.
Five of the sketches: Darlugdacha, St. Elizabeth, Cecilia Gonzaga, Margaret More, and Marie Jeanne d’Aumale, appeared in the “Irish Rosary” during 1912—I am indebted to the kindness of the Editor for permission to republish in book form. It is only one of a long list of favours, for which I am his grateful debtor.
I owe acknowledgment, also, to Professor Max Freund, Queen’s University, Belfast, for valuable direction in the Middle High German Studies underlying the sketch of St. Elizabeth.
H. C.