—The Profession of the Teacher

The more aged recipients of annuities or inmates of the asylum would have lived with relatives, not with children, for a small proportion are married; and in innumerable instances they must have depended on the slender earnings of nieces whom they had brought up to their own profession, thus laying the seed for fresh misery of a like kind. The branch of exertion consisted in the formation of provident annuities, paid for by the teachers themselves. The oversupply of teachers has moreover reacted on the custom of the employers, who have set their ideas to a certain scale, and, if they educate their children at home, refuse to pay beyond a certain percentage on the whole family income for their instruction. The arts, literature, and tuition might be safely left to provide for the livelihood of stere women, if sensible women would but turn their sense to its many legitimate spheres of action.