The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education Part 11

Even before the Civil War the commercial interests of the country had become so much extended that trade was rising into a dignity comparable to that of the learned professions. Men were more and more deserting teaching for the business life, and their places, at first chiefly in the lower grades, were being filled by women. During the five years of the war this supersession of men by women teachers advanced rapidly. It has since acquired such impetus that at present more than two thirds of the training of the young of both s.e.xes below the college grade has fallen out of the hands of men. In the mean time, too, though in smaller numbers, women have invaded the other professions and have even entered into trade. These demonstrations of a previously unsuspected capacity have been both the cause and the effect of enlarged opportunities for mental equipment. The last thirty or forty years have seen the opening of that new era in women's education which I have ventured to call the period of accomplishment.

From the middle of the century the movement to open the state universities to women, to found colleges for men and women on equal terms, and to establish independent colleges for women spread rapidly.

From their first organization the state universities of Utah (1850), Iowa (1856), Was.h.i.+ngton (1862), Kansas (1866), Minnesota (1868), Nebraska (1871) admitted women. Indiana, founded in 1820, opened its doors to women in 1868, and was followed in 1870 by Michigan, at that time the largest and far the most influential of all the state universities. From that time the movement became general. The example of Michigan was followed until at the present time all the colleges and universities of the West, excepting those under Catholic management, are open to women. The only state university in the East, that of Maine, admitted women in 1872. Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana alone among all the state universities of the country remain closed to women. This sudden opening to women of practically all universities supported by public funds is not more extraordinary than the immense endowments which during the same period have been put into independent colleges for women, or into colleges which admit men and women on equal terms. Of these privately endowed colleges, Cornell, originally founded for men, led the way in 1872 in opening its doors to women. The West and South followed rapidly, the East more slowly. Of the 480 colleges which at the end of the century are reported by the Bureau of Education, 336 admit women; or, excluding the Catholic colleges, 80 per cent of all are open to women. Of the sixty leading colleges in the United States there are only ten in which women are not admitted to some department. These ten are all on the Atlantic seaboard and are all old foundations.

This substantial accomplishment during the last forty years of the right of women to a college education has not, however, resulted in fixing a single type of college in which that education shall be obtained. On the contrary, three clearly contrasted types now exist side by side. These are the independent college, the coeducational college, and the affiliated college.

To the independent college for women men are not admitted, though the grade, the organization, and the general aim are supposed to be the same as in the colleges exclusively for men. The first college of this type, Elmira (1855), has been already mentioned. The four largest women's colleges--Va.s.sar, opened in 1861; Smith, in 1875; Wellesley, in 1875, and Bryn Mawr, in 1885--take rank among the sixty leading colleges of the country in wealth, equipment, teachers and students, and variety of studies offered. Wells College, chartered as a college in 1870, the Woman's College of Baltimore, opened in 1888, and Mt. Holyoke, reorganized as a college in 1893, have also large endowments and attendance. All the women's colleges are empowered to confer the same degrees as are given in the men's colleges.

The development of coeducation, the prevailing type of education in the United States for both men and women, has already been sufficiently described. In coeducational colleges men and women have the same instructors, recite in the same cla.s.ses, and enjoy the same freedom in choice of studies. To the faculties of these colleges women are occasionally appointed, and, like their male colleagues, teach mixed cla.s.ses of men and women. Many coeducational colleges are without halls of residence. Where these exist, special buildings are a.s.signed to the women students.

The affiliated colleges, while exclusively for women, are closely connected with strong colleges for men, whose equipment and opportunities they are expected in some degree to share. At present there are five such: Radcliffe College, the originator of this type, connected with Harvard University, and opened in 1879; Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, at Tulane University, opened in 1886; the College for Women of Western Reserve University, 1888; Barnard College, at Columbia University, 1889; the Woman's College of Brown University, 1892. In all these colleges the standards for entrance and graduation are the same as those exacted from men in the universities with which they are affiliated. To a considerable extent the instructors also are the same.

During the last quarter-century many professional schools have been opened to women--schools of theology, law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, technology, agriculture. The number of women entering these professions is rapidly increasing. Since 1890 the increase of women students in medicine is 64 per cent, in dentistry 205 per cent, in pharmacy 190 per cent, in technology and agriculture 194 per cent.

While this great advance has been accomplished in America, women in England and on the Continent, especially during the last thirty years, have been demanding better education. Though much more slowly and in fewer numbers than in this country, they have everywhere succeeded in securing decided advantages. No country now refuses them a share in liberal study, in the instruction of young children, and in the profession of medicine. As might be expected, English-speaking women, far more than any others, have won and used the opportunities of university training. Since 1860 women have been studying at Cambridge, England, and since 1879 at Oxford. At these ancient seats of learning they have now every privilege except the formal degree. To all other English and Scotch universities, and to the universities of the British colonies, women are admitted, and from them they receive degrees.

In the most northern countries of Europe--in Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark--the high schools and universities are freely open to women. In eastern Europe able women have made efforts to secure advanced study, and these efforts have been most persistent in Russia and since the Crimean war. When denied in their own land, Russian women have flocked to the Swiss and French universities, and have even gone in considerable numbers to Finland and to Italy. Now Russia is slowly responding to its women's entreaties. During the last ten years the universities of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Greece have been open to women; while in Constantinople the American College for Girls offers the women of the East the systematic training of the New England type of college. In western, central, and southern Europe all university doors are open. In these countries, degrees and honors may everywhere be had by women, except in Germany and Austria. Even here, by special permission of the Minister of Education, or the professor in charge, women may hear lectures. Each year, too, more women are granted degrees by special vote and as exceptional cases.

In brief, it may be said that practically all European universities are now open to women. No American woman of scholars.h.i.+p, properly qualified for the work she undertakes, need fear refusal if she seeks the instruction of the greatest European scholars in her chosen field. Each year American women are taking with distinction the highest university degrees of the Continent. To aid them, many fellows.h.i.+ps and graduate scholars.h.i.+ps, ranging in value from $300 to $1000, are offered for foreign study by our colleges for women and by private a.s.sociations of women who seek to promote scholars.h.i.+p. Large numbers of ambitious young women who are preparing themselves for teaching or for the higher fields of scientific research annually compete for this aid. Three years ago an a.s.sociation was formed for maintaining an American woman's table in the Zoological Station at Naples. By paying $500 a year they are thus able to grant to selected students the most favorable conditions for biological investigation. This a.s.sociation has also just offered a prize of $1000, to be granted two years hence, for the best piece of original scientific work done in the mean time by a woman. The American Schools of Cla.s.sical Studies in Athens and Rome admit women on the same terms as men, and award their fellows.h.i.+ps to men and women indifferently. One of these fellows.h.i.+ps, amounting to $1000 a year, has just been won by a woman.

The experience, then, of the last thirty years shows a condition of women's education undreamed of at the beginning of the century. It shows that though still hampered here and there by timorous restrictions, women are in substantial possession of much the same opportunities as are available for men. It shows that they have both the capacity and the desire for college training, that they can make profitable and approved use of it when obtained, and that they are eager for that broader and more original study after college work is over which is at once the most novel and the most glorious feature of university education to-day.

Indeed, women have taken more than their due proportion of the prizes, honors, and fellows.h.i.+ps which have been accessible to them on the same terms as to men. Their resort to inst.i.tutions of higher learning has increased far more than that of men. In 1872 the total number of college students in each million of population was 590. Last year it had risen to 1270, much more than doubling in twenty-seven years. During this time the number of men had risen from 540 to 947, or had not quite doubled.

The women rose from 50 in 1872 to 323 in 1899, having increased their former proportional number more than six times, and this advance has also been maintained in graduate and professional schools.

The immensity of the change which the last century has wrought in women's education may best be seen by setting side by side the conditions at its beginning and at its close. In 1800 no colleges for women existed, and only two endowed schools for girls--these belonging to a small German sect. They had no high schools, and the best grammar schools in cities were open to them only under restrictions. The commoner grammar and district schools, and an occasional private school dedicated to "accomplishments," were their only avenues to learning.

There was little hostility to their education, since it was generally a.s.sumed by men and by themselves that intellectual matters did not concern them. No profession was open to them, not even that of teaching, and only seven possible trades and occupations.

In 1900 a third of all the college students in the United States are women. Sixty per cent of the pupils in the secondary schools, both public and private, are girls--_i.e._ more girls are preparing for college than boys. Women having in general more leisure than men, there is reason to expect that there will soon be more women than men in our colleges and graduate schools. The time, too, has pa.s.sed when girls went to college to prepare themselves solely for teaching or for other bread-winning occupations. In considerable numbers they now seek intellectual resources and the enrichment of their private lives. Thus far between 50 and 60 per cent of women college graduates have at some time taught. In the country at large more than 70 per cent of the teaching is done by women, in the North Atlantic portion over 80 per cent. Even in the secondary schools, public and private, more women than men are teaching, though in all other countries the advanced instruction of boys is exclusively in the hands of men. Never before has a nation intrusted all the school training of the vast majority of its future population, men as well as women, to women alone.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Published in _The New York Evening Post_, 1900.

XV

WOMEN'S EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR[16]

Few persons have stood in the Court of Honor at Chicago and felt the surpa.s.sing splendors gathered there, without a certain dismay over its swiftly approaching disappearance. Never in the world before has beauty been so lavish and so transient. Probably in all departments of the Fair a hundred million dollars have been spent. Now the nation's holiday is done, the little half-year is over, and the palaces with their widely gathered treasures vanish like a dream. Is all indeed gone? Will nothing remain? Wise observers perceive some permanent results of the merry-making. What these will be in the busy life of men, others may decide: I point out chiefly a few of the beneficial influences of the great Fair on the life of women.

The triumph of women in what may be called their detached existence, that is, in their guidance of themselves and the separated affairs of their s.e.x, has been unexpectedly great. The Government appointed an independent Board of Lady Managers who, through many difficulties, gathered from every quarter of the globe interesting exhibits of feminine industry and skill. These they gracefully disposed in one of the most dignified buildings of the Fair, itself a woman's design. Here they attractively ill.u.s.trated every aspect of the life of women, domestic, philanthropic, commercial, literary, artistic, and traced their historic advance. Close at hand, in another building also of their own erection, they appropriately appeared as the guardians and teachers of little children. Their halls were crowded, their dinners praised, their reception invitations coveted. Throughout they showed organizing ability on a huge scale; they developed noteworthy leaders; what is more, they followed them, and they have quarrelled no more, and have pulled wires less, than men in similar situations; their courage, their energy, their tact in the erection of a monument to woman were astonis.h.i.+ng; and the efforts of their Central Board were efficiently seconded by similar companies in every state. As in the Sanitary and Christian Commissions and the hospital service of the war, in the mult.i.tude of women's clubs, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the King's Daughters, the a.s.sociations for promoting women's suffrage, so once more here women found an opportunity to prove their ability as a banded s.e.x; and it is clear that they awakened in the nation a deeper respect for their powers.

But the very triumph does away with its further necessity. Having amply proved what they can do when banded together, women may now the more easily cease to treat themselves as a peculiar people. Henceforth they are human beings. Women's buildings, women's exhibits, may safely become things of the past. At any future fair no special treatment of women is likely to be called for. After what has been achieved, the self-consciousness of women will be lessened, and their sensitiveness about their own position, capacity, and rights will be naturally outgrown. The anthropologist may perhaps still a.s.semble the work of a single s.e.x, the work of people of a single color, or of those having blue eyes. But ordinary people will find less and less interest in these artificial cla.s.sifications, and will more and more incline to measure men's and women's products by the same scale. Even at Chicago large numbers of women preferred to range their exhibits in the common halls rather than under feminine banners, and their demonstration of the needlessness of any special treatment of their s.e.x must be reckoned as one of the most considerable of the permanent gains for women from the Fair.

If, then, women have demonstrated that they are more than isolated phenomena, that they should indeed be treated as integral members of the human family, in order to estimate rightly the lasting advantages they have derived from the Fair we must seek those advantages not in isolations but in conjunctions. In the common life of man there is a womanly side and a manly side. Both have profited by one splendid event.

Manufactures and transportation and mining and agriculture will hereafter be different because of what has occurred at Chicago; but so will domestic science, the training of the young, the swift intellectual interest, the finer patriotism, the apprehension of beauty, the moral balance. It is by growth in these things that the emanc.i.p.ation of women is to come about, and the Fair has fostered them all in an extraordinary degree.

Although the Fair was officially known as a World's Fair, and it did contain honorable contributions from many foreign countries, it was, in a sense that no other exhibition has been before, a nation's fair. It was the climacteric expression of America's existence. It gathered together our past and our present, and indicated not uncertainly our future. Here were made visible our beginnings, our achievements, our hopes, our dreams. The nation became conscious of itself and was strong, beautiful, proud. All sections of the country not only contributed their most characteristic objects of use and beauty, but their inhabitants also came, and learned to know one another, and their land. During the last two years there has hardly been a village in the country which has not had its club or circle studying the history of the United States. No section has been too poor to subscribe money for maintaining national or state pride. In order to see the great result, men have mortgaged their farms, lonely women have taken heavy life insurance, stringent economy will gladly be practised for years. A friend tells me that she saw an old man, as he left the Court of Honor with tears in his eyes, turn to his gray-haired wife and say, "Well, Susan, it paid even if it did take all the burial money."

Once before, we reached a similar pitch of national consciousness,--in war. Young, unprepared, divided against ourselves, we found ourselves able to ma.s.s great armies, endure long strains, organize campaigns, commissariats, hospitals, in altogether independent ways, and on a scale greater than Europe had seen. Then men and women alike learned the value of mutual confidence, the strength of cooperation and organization. Once again now, but this time in the interest of beauty and of peace, we have studied the art of subordinating fragmentary interests to those of a whole. The training we have received as a nation in producing and studying the Fair, must result in a deeper national dignity, which will both free us from irritating sensitiveness over foreign criticism, and give us readiness to learn from other countries whatever lessons they can teach. Our own provinces too will become less provincial. With increased acquaintance, the East has begun to drop its toleration of the West, and to put friendliness and honor in its place. No more will it be believed along the Atlantic coast that the Mississippi Valley cares only for pork, grain and lumber. As such superst.i.tions decay, a more trustful unity becomes possible. The entire nation knows itself a nation, possessed of common ideals. In this heightened national dignity, women will have a large and enn.o.bling share.

But further, from the Fair men, and women with them, have acquired a new sense of the gains that come from minute obedience to law. Hitherto, "go as you please" has been pretty largely the principle of American life.

In the training school of the last two years of preparation and the six months of the holding of the Fair, our people, particularly our women, have been solidly taught the hard and needful lesson that whims, waywardness, haste, inaccuracy, pettiness, personal considerations, do not make for strength. Wherever these have entered, they have flawed the beautiful whole, and flecked the honor of us all. Where they have been absent results have appeared which make us all rejoice. Never in so wide an undertaking was the unity of a single design so triumphant. As an unknown mult.i.tude cooperated in the building of a mediaeval cathedral, so throughout our land mult.i.tudes have been daily ready to contribute their unmarked best for the erection of a common glory. We have thus learned to prize second thoughts above first thoughts, to league our lives and purposes with those of others, and to subordinate the a.s.sertion of ourselves to that of a universal reason. Hence has sprung a new trust in one another and a new confidence in our future. The friendliness of our people, already rendered natural by our democratic inst.i.tutions, has received a deeper sanction. How distinctly it was marked on the faces of the visitors at the Fair! I was fortunate enough to spend several hours there on Chicago Day, when nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand people were admitted. The appearance of those plain, intelligent, happy, helpful thousands, all strangers and all kind, was the most encouraging sight one woman had at the Fair. It has been said that the moral education of a child consists in imparting to him the three qualities, obedience, sympathy, dignity. These all have been taught by the Fair, and women, more swiftly perceptive than men, have probably learned their lesson best.

One more profound effect of the Fair upon human character must be mentioned, on character in those features which are of especial importance to women. Our people have here gained a new sense of beauty, and of beauty at its highest and rarest, not the beauty of ornament and decoration, but that of proportion, balance, and ordered suitability of parts. Every girl likes pretty things, but the rational basis of beauty in the harmonious expression of use, and in furnis.h.i.+ng to the eye the quiet satisfaction of its normal demands, seldom attracts attention. At Chicago these things became apparent. Each building outwardly announced its inner purpose. Each gained its effect mainly by outline and balance of ma.s.ses rather than by richness of detail. Each was designed in reference to its site and to its neighbor buildings. Almost every one rested the eye which it still stimulated. Color, form, purpose, proportion, sculpture, vegetation, stretches of water, the brown earth, all cooperated toward the happy effect. What visitor could see it and not have begotten in him the demand for beauty in his own surroundings?

It is said that the Centennial Exhibition affected the domestic architecture and the household decoration of the whole eastern seaboard.

The Fair will do the same, but it will bring about a beauty of a higher, simpler sort. In people from every section, artistic taste has been developed, or even created; and not only in their houses, but in the architecture of their public buildings and streets shall we see the results of this vision of the White City by the Lake. Huddled houses in incongruous surroundings will become less common. At heart we Americans are idealists, and at a time when the general wealth is rapidly increasing, it is an indescribable gain to have had such a training of the aesthetic sense as days among the great buildings and nights on the lagoons have brought to millions of our people. The teachability of the common American is almost pathetic. One building was always crowded--the Fine Arts Building; yet great pictures were the one thing exhibited with which Americans have hitherto had little or no acquaintance. This beauty, connected essentially with the feminine side of life, will hereafter, through the influence of the Fair, become a more usual possession of us all.

If such are the permanent gains for character which women in common with men, yet even more than they, have derived from the Fair, there remain to be considered certain helps which have been brought to women in some of their most distinctive occupations. Of course they have had here an opportunity to compare the different kinds of sewing-machines, pianos, type-writers, telegraphs, clothes-wringers, stoves, and baby-carriages, and no doubt they will do their future work with these complicated engines more effectively because of such comparative study. But there are three departments which ancestral usage has especially consecrated to women, and to intelligent methods in each of these the Fair has given a mighty impulse. These three departments are the care of the home, the care of the young, and the care of the sick, the poor, and the depraved.

At Philadelphia in 1876 Vienna bread was made known, and the native article, sodden with saleratus, which up to that time had desolated the country, began to disappear. The results in cookery from the Chicago Exhibition will be wider. They touch the kitchen with intelligence at more points. Where tradition has reigned unquestioned, science is beginning to penetrate, and we are no longer allowed to eat without asking why and what. This new "domestic science"--threatening word--was set forth admirably in the Rumford Kitchen, where a capital thirty-cent luncheon was served every day, compounded of just those ingredients which the human frame could be demonstrated to require. The health-food companies, too, arrayed their appetizing wares. Workingmen's homes showed on how small a sum a family could live, and live well.

Arrangements for sterilizing water and milk were there, Atkinson cookers, gas and kerosene stoves. The proper sanitation of the home was taught, and boards of health turned out to the plain gaze of the world their inquisitorial processes. Numberless means of increasing the health, ease, and happiness of the household with the least expenditure of time and money were here studied by crowds of despairing housekeepers. Many, no doubt, were bewildered; but many, too, went away convinced that the most ancient employment of women was rising to the dignity and attractiveness of a learned profession.

When it is remembered that nine tenths of the teachers of elementary schools are women, it can be seen how important for them was the magnificent educational exhibit. Here could be studied all that the age counts best in kindergarten, primary, grammar, high and normal schools, and in all the varieties of training in cookery, sewing, dressmaking, manual training, drawing, painting, carving. Many of the exhibitors showed great skill in making their methods apprehensible to the stranger.

And then there were the modes of bodily training, and the lamentable image of the misformed average girl; and in the children's building cla.s.ses could actually be seen engaged in happy exercise, and close at hand appliances for the nursery and the playground. Nor in the enlarged appliances for woman's domestic life must those be omitted which tell how cheaply and richly the girl may now obtain a college training like her brother, and become as intelligent as he. No woman went away from the educational exhibits of the Fair in the belief that woman's sphere was necessarily narrow.

There is no need to dilate on the light shed by the Fair upon problems of sickness, poverty, and crime. Everybody knows that nothing so complete had been seen before. The Anthropological Building was a museum of these subjects, and scattered in other parts of the Fair was much to interest the puzzled and sympathetic soul. One could find out what an ideal hospital was like, and how its service and appliances should be ordered. One studied under competent teachers the care of the dependent and delinquent cla.s.ses. One learned to distinguish surface charity from sound. As men grow busier and women more competent, the guidance of philanthropy pa.s.ses continually more and more into the gentler hands.

Women serve largely on boards of hospitals, prisons, charities, and reforms, and urgently feel the need of ampler knowledge. The Fair did much to show them ways of obtaining it.

Such are the permanent results of the Fair most likely to affect women. They fall into three cla.s.ses: the proofs women have given of their independent power, their ability to organize and to work toward a distant, difficult, and complex end; the enlargement of their outlook, manifesting itself in a new sense of members.h.i.+p in a nation, a more willing obedience to law, and a higher appreciation of beauty; and, lastly, the direct a.s.sistance given to women in their more characteristic employments of housekeeping, teaching, and ministering to the afflicted. That these are all, or even the most important, results which each woman will judge she has obtained, is not pretended. Everybody saw at the Fair something which brought to individual him or her a gain incomparable.

And, after all, the greatest thing was the total, glittering, murmurous, restful, magical, evanescent Fair itself, seated by the blue waters, wearing the five crowns, served by novel boatmen, and with the lap so full of treasure that as piece by piece it was held up, it shone, was wondered at, and was lost again in the pile. This amazing spectacle will flash for years upon the inward eye of our people, and be a joy of their solitude.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Published in _The Forum_ for December, 1891.

XVI

WHY GO TO COLLEGE?

To a largely increasing number of young girls college doors are opening every year. Every year adds to the number of men who feel as a friend of mine, a successful lawyer in a great city, felt when in talking of the future of his four little children he said, "For the two boys it is not so serious, but I lie down at night afraid to die and leave my daughters only a bank account." Year by year, too, the experiences of life are teaching mothers that happiness does not necessarily come to their daughters when accounts are large and banks are sound, but that on the contrary they take grave risks when they trust everything to acc.u.mulated wealth and the chance of a happy marriage. Our American girls themselves are becoming aware that they need the stimulus, the discipline, the knowledge, the interests of the college in addition to the school, if they are to prepare themselves for the most serviceable lives.

But there are still parents who say, "There is no need that my daughter should teach; then why should she go to college?" I will not reply that college training is a life insurance for a girl, a pledge that she possesses the disciplined ability to earn a living for herself and others in case of need; for I prefer to insist on the importance of giving every girl, no matter what her present circ.u.mstances, a special training in some one thing by which she can render society service, not of amateur but of expert sort, and service too for which it will be willing to pay a price. The number of families will surely increase who will follow the example of an eminent banker whose daughters have been given each her specialty. One has chosen music, and has gone far with the best masters in this country and in Europe, so far that she now holds a high rank among musicians at home and abroad. Another has taken art; and has not been content to paint pretty gifts for her friends, but in the studios of New York, Munich, and Paris she has won the right to be called an artist, and in her studio at home to paint portraits which have a market value. A third has proved that she can earn her living, if need be, by her exquisite jellies, preserves, and sweetmeats. Yet the house in the mountains, the house by the sea, and the friends in the city are not neglected, nor are these young women found less attractive because of their special accomplishments.

While it is not true that all girls should go to college any more than that all boys should go, it is nevertheless true that they should go in greater numbers than at present. They fail to go because they, their parents, and their teachers, do not see clearly the personal benefits distinct from the commercial value of a college training. I wish here to discuss these benefits, these larger gifts of the college life,--what they may be, and for whom they are waiting.

It is undoubtedly true that many girls are totally unfitted by home and school life for a valuable college course. These joys and successes, these high interests and friends.h.i.+ps, are not for the self-conscious and nervous invalid, nor for her who in the exuberance of youth recklessly ignores the laws of a healthy life. The good society of scholars and of libraries and laboratories has no place and no attraction for her who finds no message in Plato, no beauty in mathematical order, and who never longs to know the meaning of the stars over her head or the flowers under her feet. Neither will the finer opportunities of college life appeal to one who, until she is eighteen (is there such a girl in this country?), has felt no pa.s.sion for the service of others, no desire to know if through history, or philosophy, or any study of the laws of society, she can learn why the world is so sad, so hard, so selfish as she finds it, even when she looks upon it from the most sheltered life.

No, the college cannot be, should not try to be, a subst.i.tute for the hospital, reformatory, or kindergarten. To do its best work it should be organized for the strong, not for the weak; for the high-minded, self-controlled, generous, and courageous spirits, not for the indifferent, the dull, the idle, or those who are already forming their characters on the amus.e.m.e.nt theory of life. All these perverted young people may, and often do, get large benefit and invigoration, new ideals, and unselfish purposes from their four years' companions.h.i.+p with teachers and comrades of a higher physical, mental, and moral stature than their own. I have seen girls change so much in college that I have wondered if their friends at home would know them,--the voice, the carriage, the unconscious manner, all telling a story of new tastes and habits and loves and interests, that had wrought out in very truth a new creature. Yet in spite of this I have sometimes thought that in college more than elsewhere the old law holds, "To him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance, but from him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have." For it is the young life which is open and prepared to receive which obtains the gracious and uplifting influences of college days. What, then, for such persons are the rich and abiding rewards of study in college or university?