How far S. J.-B. was depressed in mind and body by the events of that wearing fight, we can fairly guess. But nothing had happened to disturb in the smallest degree her faith,—her philosophy of life. She never doubted that she was fighting the battle of the Lord; but—greatly though she hoped, sure though she felt of final victory for her cause—she was always, in the background of her being, absolutely prepared for the defeat of any one of her plans. In the thick of the combat, she seemed so engrossed that comrades and onlookers were wont to say,—“Defeat will kill her,” but this was a complete misunderstanding of her attitude. The moment defeat came, it was accepted as simply the will of God, though it well might be that God still meant her to try again.

In the occasional great affairs of later life it was positively startling to contrast her apparent inability to recognize another side to the question at issue with her instant acceptance of an adverse decision when it came. But for the vital record we now possess of her youth, most people would have had no clue. She was not ordinarily taken for a religious woman; but it is simply true that the watchword of her life—passively and actively—was Fiat voluntas tua.

She was one of those who pray; but she would have thought it wrong to pray for the success of a definite scheme, for the life of a friend, even—in the hour of her greatest need—for the renewal of a broken friendship.

And indeed there was always some comfort at hand, quite apart from the highest philosophy. To the end of her life the words were often on her lips, “You see we had such excellent friends”; and though some few adherents were estranged because they thought the battle was being fought too pugnaciously, others became increasingly impressed by the extraordinary constancy shown by the fighters, and, in particular, by the protagonist’s rare and individual type of unworldliness, an unworldliness which, just because it was individual, often made life rather difficult for her supporters.

Here is a letter from one of the Edinburgh professors, who in the early days had begged S. J.-B. not to speak harshly of an Alma Mater of which she would yet be proud, and who, later, had congratulated her on a book which “tells a very sad and disgraceful story, and tells it clearly and temperately and effectively,—all the more effectively because your justifiable indignation is kept well within bounds”:

Immediately after the legal decision had been given, the Spectator took up the question in an article “Women’s Wrongs at Edinburgh,” of which the following sentences give the gist:

This was shrewd and true.

Within a few days a long and exhaustive review of the position and its possibilities, from the pen of Mrs. Garrett Anderson, appeared in the Times, in the course of which the writer urged that the time was not ripe for the medical education of women in Great Britain, and that “in no way could women better serve the cause we desire to promote than by going to Paris to study medicine, and returning here as soon as might be to practise it.” “Never,” she said, “was there a case in which the truth of the adage, ‘Solvitur ambulando,’ was more likely to make itself felt.” [In the spirit of Professor Hodgson’s translation of Horace, one may say, in fact, that “the difficulty might be solved by crossing the Channel.”]

Of course S. J.-B. did not agree with her, and she wrote a detailed reply^[113] which Jupiter supported with a leading utterance in his own name. He was not enthusiastic about women doctors at all, but in this particular difference of opinion he gave his vote for the “equally deserving, but hitherto less fortunate aspirant to the position of a legally qualified practitioner.”^[114]

S. J.-B. knew more of the hidden springs than anyone, and she did not consider that the time had come to give in. She who had borne the brunt of so many disappointments was still full of hope. She wanted her own country to give her this thing. Above all she felt that “so long as no means of education are provided at home, only a very small number of women will ever seek admission to the profession.”

“This last consideration,” she says, “was to me conclusive.”

“I greatly admire your letter to Mrs. G. Anderson,” wrote Professor Hodgson, “and I am truly glad to see that you are not so despondent as I am. The passive power of resistance on the part of those who hold a position is terribly difficult to overcome. It is not mere inertia; that would be bad enough. Ultimate success I do not at all despair of, but individual life is short and the journey is long and arduous.”

Both Times and Spectator spoke severely of the behaviour of the University, and on September 1st an apologia appeared from the pen of the Principal. It was just the letter one might have expected from an able, urbane, scholarly gentleman; he scanned the whole history “as we do our own poetry, laying stress on the right syllables and passing lightly over a halting foot.” It would have been a fine and conclusive defence,—if Jupiter had not allowed a poor overworked medical student to answer it. The two letters represent two conflicting schools of historians, the one sweeping, picturesque, probable: the other definite, statistical, true. The former is certainly the easier to read. The correspondence is so essentially typical of many of the “disputes” S. J.-B. had with others in the course of her life that it is given in full in the appendix.^[115]

“I have seen the Venerable Principal’s letter,” wrote a distinguished lawyer from Uig, “for even in these uttermost parts of the earth the Scotsman has reached me, and I need not say what I thought of it. I read also with great satisfaction your thorough demolition of the learned and venerable and inaccurate gentleman, and the Scotsman’s excellent punching of his head.”

S. J.-B. spent part of that summer holiday visiting Norfolk cousins, and she took the opportunity to read a paper on her special subject at the Social Science Congress at Norwich, under the auspices of her friend, Professor Hodgson, who was President of the Education Section.^[116] Here she made two friendships of great value,—one with Miss Louisa Hubbard, whose sister, Lady Rendel, had been S. J.-B.’s schoolfellow; the other, even more memorable, with Miss Pauline Irby, who was just entering upon her heroic and self-sacrificing life work in Bosnia. In October S. J.-B. returned to Edinburgh to clinch the arrangements Mrs. Thorne was making for the winter session.

It is one more instance of the extraordinary, dogged perseverance of those women that during that winter session the lectures were delivered to women as before by Edinburgh Extra-Mural lecturers, the subjects being Materia Medica, Pathology and Midwifery. S. J.-B. attended these lectures when she could, and took honours in all of them; but she was already in correspondence with Dr. Anstie and others as to the possibility of opening some school for women in the larger and more impersonal milieu of London. As a matter of fact, the whole centre of interest had changed. The question was now potentially before Parliament,—not indeed as a question of practical politics to be decided by the rank and file, but as a matter for private discussion by a few men of courage and vision.

“It was necessary,” wrote Mr. Stansfeld in reviewing the history three years later,^[117] “to appeal to a yet higher tribunal. Such appeal might have been made on the question of law to the House of Lords; but that would have meant further indefinite delay and further heavy expense, and then, if the result were favourable, a probable refusal of the university to act on their ascertained powers. It was necessary to secure the admission of women to medical study and practice, and not merely to ascertain that one out of nineteen examining bodies could admit them if it liked. Miss Jex-Blake and her friends determined to widen their appeal, to base it on the ground of right, and to address it to Parliament and to public opinion.”

As early as August 1872 Sir David Wedderburn (on behalf of Sir Robert Anstruther) had moved that the vote for the Scottish Universities should be reduced by the amount of the salaries of the Edinburgh Medical Professors. He explained that the motion was brought forward in order to lay before the House the course followed by the authorities of the University of Edinburgh, but that, in view of the fact that the Lord Ordinary, had, a few days before, given a judgment in favour of the ladies, he hoped the University would accept the decision as final and as indicating to them their duties in the matter; and he would therefore refrain from pressing the motion to a division.

When the University appealed against the Lord Ordinary’s decision, and got it reversed on appeal, Sir David Wedderburn, on July 29th, 1873, gave notice that he would, early in the following session, bring in a Bill to grant to the Scottish Universities the power they were now supposed not to possess, to educate women in medicine and to grant to them the ordinary medical degrees.

It was highly desirable, of course, to secure Government support for this Bill, and in October we find S. J.-B. in correspondence with the Home Secretary. There is a long letter marked “Private” in which Mr. Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) expresses his view of the matter, and asks her to let him know what course she proposes to follow. Shortly after, we get the following:

Clearly she was eager to follow up the opening, for ten days later he writes again:

So, early in January, S. J.-B. went up to London to interview ministers and others.

After a few days spent with Mrs. Jex-Blake at Brighton the tale proceeds:

It was only too true. The time of reaction had come after a long period of reforming energy under Mr. Gladstone, and now—failing to find an adequate rallying cry for his party—he dissolved Parliament and appealed to the country. In the confusion of the moment the Home Secretary did not forget the women students.

This was followed on February 10th by a letter from Mr. Stansfeld:

The suggested letter was roughly drafted forthwith:

A most gracious answer to this arrived without loss of time:

It was characteristic of the vicissitudes of S. J.-B.’s life at the time that within a few days of receiving this letter she had a telegram from Mrs. Jex-Blake’s physician at Brighton: “Your Mother is very poorly. I should like you to come.”

This was delivered at 8 p.m., and it is needless to say that she started by the night train. A fortnight of anxious nursing followed; but her affairs were not forgotten:

A sharp little illness made it difficult for Mr. Stansfeld to pursue the matter for a week or two, but finally we get the following:

This was apparently followed by a letter, for, at the earliest possible moment on March 24th, S. J.-B. sent down a note by hand to her solicitor:

The Draft Bill seems to have been posted that afternoon, and the following day another telegram arrived:

So of course S. J.-B. travelled up to London next day.

A day or two later S. J.-B. dined with the Cowper Temples and details were threshed out.

There was much discussion as to the desirability of keeping quiet about the Bill, and allowing it to slip through, if possible, without arousing all the energies of the opposition.

So the glove was thrown down, and, as Dr. Cameron had predicted, the news of it was instantly flashed from Dan to Beersheba. In a very short time 65 petitions in favour of the Bill were presented to Parliament, three of these being from the Town Councils of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Linlithgow. There was also one from the City of Edinburgh, and one from 16,000 women. The most important, perhaps, was from twenty-six Professors of Scottish Universities, including eight (out of fourteen) Professors of the University of St. Andrews,—among them the Rev. Principal Tulloch,—and thirteen Professors of the University of Edinburgh. If Glasgow was poorly represented in number, the women had all the more reason to be proud of the weight of the two names,—John and Edward Caird. There was also a petition from those Edinburgh lecturers who had actually taught the women.

Against the Bill there were four petitions:

1. From the University Court of Edinburgh.

2. From the Senatus of Edinburgh University.

3. From the Medical Faculty of the Senatus (probably identical with 2).

4. From the University of Glasgow.

The second reading of the Bill was fixed for April 24th, but at the urgent request of Dr. Lyon Playfair, member for the University of Edinburgh, it was postponed to a later date (“in order that his University might have time to consider the subject”!) when the pressure of business made it impossible to secure any day: or, as Miss M‘Laren had predicted, it failed to “get through.” And so the whole question was practically shelved for another year.

There was an interesting debate on the motion, however, on June 12th, 1874, when able speeches were made by Mr. Cowper Temple, Mr. Stansfeld and others,—the two members for Edinburgh (Town and Gown) providing an almost dramatic contrast.

Mr. M‘Laren (Town), hard-headed, shrewd man of business, bluntly declared that “if it were a question to be decided by the intelligent inhabitants of Edinburgh, nine-tenths would vote in its favour.... If two or three of the professors would only take a voyage round the world, the whole question would be satisfactorily settled before they returned. (Laughter.) Where the male students paid three or four guineas for each class, the ladies paid eight or ten guineas, so that money was no obstacle. There was no difficulty, in fact, except want of will, and that arose from medical prejudice,—at least that was the opinion of the great majority of the people in Edinburgh.”

Dr. Lyon Playfair (Gown), scholar, courtier, man-of-the-world, had a harder task. Even Punch was moved to sympathy with him “as one in a perplexity between his constituents and his convictions.”

In any case the whole question had entered on a new phase, there was fresh enthusiasm for the cause, and, on the other hand, those who had looked upon the idea of women doctors as an amusing absurdity, were roused to perturbation and alarm.

It is a terrible thing for a hasty, impulsive, faulty human being to be placed as S. J.-B. was at this time, in a difficult position—on a slippery ridge, as it were—in the eye of the whole world. It has been said before that few people ventured to “lecture” her: she liked to hear the truth, and, when her friends were prepared to risk all, she took their faithful dealing magnanimously, often nobly: but somehow she made adverse criticism very difficult. It was said of her that she would have made an excellent advocate,—she had so keen an eye for the strong points of her own position and the weak points of those of her adversaries; and it is only fair to say that, in conversation with her, many people might well be simply carried away. In a sort of esprit d’escalier—or jugement d’escalier—they might see the other side of the question, and sometimes they wrote a qualifying letter to say so; but we know how few people are prepared in life to take that amount of trouble in a matter that does not intimately concern themselves. It is so much easier to sympathize with those who confide to us their troubles and difficulties, and then to vent our jugement d’escalier on the man we meet in the street below. In the course of her life S. J.-B. got more than her share of that kind of sympathy.

We have seen that, in the matter of her examination the year before, she did not admit the justice of her rejection. She was supported in this attitude by the opinion of three or four lecturers and examiners in the subjects for which she had entered, who had read her papers and had cordially pronounced them—in writing—to be up to or above the pass standard. Hundreds of people had, of course, expressed to her their belief that she had not been fairly treated, and their sympathy had steadily intensified the impression in her own mind. She would have accepted Huxley’s verdict loyally, if all the papers handed in at that examination could have been submitted to him. No one who reads one paper only can possibly say—except by an exercise of faith in his fellow creatures—whether worse papers have been accepted and better rejected, or no. It would have been strange indeed if Huxley had not had that amount of faith in his colleagues.

From the moment of Dr. (afterwards Sir Wyville) Thomson’s appointment to the Chair of Biology, S. J.-B. had dreaded him as an examiner, on the ground that he was altogether adverse to the women. “You will receive no insolence from him,” Professor Tait had written to her in 1871, “but I fear that is all I can say, though it is something.” And previously, “although he is not in your favour, he is not a man to take any mean or unfair advantage.”

She ought, of course, to have accepted this judgment once for all as that of a just man, but from the time of her examination the conviction that she had been unfairly treated never wavered, though the whole matter was, she thought, a thing of the past forever.

In a great controversy, however, nothing may ever be safely assumed to be a thing of the past. It seems to be buried forever, but it lies at the mercy of any chance turn of the spade.

And this brings us back to the point where Dr. Lyon Playfair, “in a perplexity between his constituents and his convictions”—those constituents meaning to all intents and purposes the “two or three Professors” for whom the Member for Edinburgh had recommended a voyage round the world as a means of solving the whole difficulty—Dr. Lyon Playfair had so availed himself of the machinery of Parliament as to shelve the whole question indefinitely.

One quite realizes that by this time it was war to the knife on both sides, and one refrains from unduly criticising either; but it is S. J.-B. whose life we are considering, and there can be no doubt that for her—overworked and overstrained as she was—the situation was very hard to bear.

And now the discussion in Parliament, literally bringing the question “into the range of practical politics,” had stirred up all the latent objection to the idea of women doctors, and had brought every weapon into play. One can dimly conjecture the number and variety of assaults that must have been made on the leading newspapers, and it is small wonder if some of them were sorely unsettled, so much so that “the pulpit spake pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon.”

Even the Times began to talk of “all the delicacies and best charms” of woman’s nature, and took occasion to say in a leading article, “It is a little amusing, indeed, that one of the Ladies who had rendered herself most conspicuous, should after all have failed under the test of examination.” The writer did not add—perhaps he had not been informed—that three of the fellow-students of that conspicuous Lady had successfully passed the examination in question in a previous year; but the playful taunt—if taunt it was—was more than the generous spirit of one of those successful candidates could stand. She wrote an impulsive letter, mentioning S. J.-B. by name, and explaining that it was “devotion to our cause which led to her failure,” that “she had borne the brunt of the battle, and had spared her fellow-students all the harass and worry of the struggle, and had thus enabled them to enjoy the leisure requisite for passing their examinations.”

Of course the writer should have consulted S. J.-B. before sending this letter to the Times, but apparently it never occurred to her that the defence might not be acceptable to the one defended. In any case, the letter came upon S. J.-B. like a thunderbolt, and she committed the great and crowning mistake of her life,—she wrote a letter to the Times, implying in effect that in the matter of the examination, she did not believe she had been fairly treated.

It was quite a temperate letter from her point of view, but—as her brother had said—she was throwing pebbles at a fortress, and, what was worse, throwing them under the gaze of the whole civilized world.

If Professor Crum Brown had done the Women’s Cause a service by denying to Miss Pechey the name and privileges of Hope Scholar, S. J.-B. had now repaid that service to him and his colleagues, full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.

Under the mighty Ægis of the University of Edinburgh, the examiners replied, and Professor Huxley himself entered the controversy in defence of his friend, Dr. Wyville Thomson, who was away on the “Challenger” Expedition at the time.

Miss Pechey was only restrained by prudent friends from publishing a generous letter in which she expressed her conviction that, if Professor Huxley had examined the Edinburgh students, 90 per cent. of them would have failed, and she added a paragraph which shows at least how differently a great institution may look when regarded from two different points of view:

“It is really amusing to those who know anything of the constitution of the University to find [the Examiners] gravely suggesting that [S. J.-B.] could have appealed to the Medical Faculty, the Senatus, and the University Court. The names have an imposing sound, but, when one comes to consider, the Medical Faculty resolves itself into the medical examiners, the Senatus (at that time of the year, before the arts professors had returned for the winter) into the Medical Faculty, whilst the University Court is in reality the mouthpiece of one member who I fear would turn a deaf ear to any appeal from Miss Jex-Blake.”