Chapter III: Papers by Alice Freeman Palmer (10)

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 scholarship, 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 fellowships and graduate scholarships, ranging in value from $300 to $1000, are offered for foreign study by our colleges for women and by private associations of women who seek to promote scholarship. 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 association 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 association 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 Classical Studies in Athens and Rome admit women on the same terms as men, and award their fellowships to men and women indifferently. One of these fellowships, 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 fellowships which have been accessible to them on the same terms as to men. Their resort to institutions 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 assumed 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 passed 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 surpassing 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 sex, 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 illustrated 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 astonishing; 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 multitude of women's clubs, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the King's Daughters, the associations for promoting women's suffrage, so once more here women found an opportunity to prove their ability as a banded sex; 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 assemble the work of a single sex, 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 classifications, 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 sex 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 emancipation 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 mass 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 superstitions 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 ennobling 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 multitude cooperated in the building of a mediaeval cathedral, so throughout our land multitudes 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 assertion 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 institutions, 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 furnishing 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 masses 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 classes 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 classes. One learned to distinguish surface charity from sound. As men grow busier and women more competent, the guidance of philanthropy passes 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 classes: 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 membership in a nation, a more willing obedience to law, and a higher appreciation of beauty; and, lastly, the direct assistance 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 accumulated 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 circumstances, 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 friendships, 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 passion 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 substitute 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 amusement 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' companionship 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?

Preeminently the college is a place of education. That is the ground of its being. We go to college to know, assured that knowledge is sweet and powerful, that a good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of the world. No college which does not thoroughly educate can be called good, no matter what else it does. No student who fails to get a little knowledge on many subjects, and much knowledge on some, can be said to have succeeded, whatever other advantages she may have found by the way. It is a beautiful and significant fact that in all times the years of learning have been also the years of romance. Those who love girls and boys pray that our colleges may be homes of sound learning, for knowledge is the condition of every college blessing. "Let no man incapable of mathematics enter here," Plato is reported to have inscribed over his Academy door. "Let no one to whom hard study is repulsive hope for anything from us," American colleges might paraphrase. Accordingly in my talk to-day I shall say little of the direct benefits of knowledge which the college affords. These may be assumed. It is on their account that one knocks at the college door. But seeking this first, a good many other things are added. I want to point out some of these collateral advantages of going to college, or rather to draw attention to some of the many forms in which the winning of knowledge presents itself.

The first of these is happiness. Everybody wants "a good time," especially every girl in her teens. A good time, it is true, does not always in these years mean what it will mean by and by, any more than the girl of eighteen plays with the doll which entranced the child of eight. It takes some time to discover that work is the best sort of play, and some people never discover it at all. But when mothers ask such questions as these: "How can I make my daughter happy?" "How can I give her the best society?" "How can she have a good time?" the answer in most cases is simple. Send her to college--to almost any college. Send her because there is no other place where between eighteen and twenty-two she is so likely to have a genuinely good time. Merely for good times, for romance, for society, college life offers unequalled opportunities. Of course no idle person can possibly be happy, even for a day, nor she who makes a business of trying to amuse herself. For full happiness, though its springs are within, we want health and friends and work and objects of aspiration. "We live by admiration, hope, and love," says Wordsworth. The college abounds in all three. In the college time new powers are sprouting, and intelligence, merriment, truthfulness, and generosity are more natural than the opposite qualities often become in later years. An exhilarating atmosphere pervades the place. We who are in it all the time feel that we live at the fountain of perpetual youth, and those who take but a four years' bath in it become more cheerful, strong, and full of promise than they are ever likely to find themselves again; for a college is a kind of compendium of the things that most men long for. It is usually planted in a beautiful spot, the charm of trees and water being added to stately buildings and stimulating works of art. Venerable associations of the past hallow its halls. Leaders in the stirring world of to-day return at each Commencement to share the fresh life of the new class. Books, pictures, music, collections, appliances in every field, learned teachers, mirthful friends, athletics for holidays, the best words of the best men for holy days,--all are here. No wonder that men look back upon their college life as upon halcyon days, the romantic period of youth. No wonder that Dr. Holmes's poems to his Harvard classmates find an echo in college reunions everywhere; and gray-haired men, who outside the narrowing circle of home have not heard their first names for years, remain Bill and Joe and John and George to college comrades, even if unseen for more than a generation.

Yet a girl should go to college not merely to obtain four happy years, but to make a second gain, which is often overlooked, and is little understood even when perceived; I mean a gain in health. The old notion that low vitality is a matter of course with women; that to be delicate is a mark of superior refinement, especially in well-to-do families; that sickness is a dispensation of Providence,--these notions meet with no acceptance in college. Years ago I saw in the mirror frame of a college freshman's room this little formula: "Sickness is carelessness, carelessness is selfishness, and selfishness is sin." And I have often noticed among college girls an air of humiliation and shame when obliged to confess a lack of physical vigor, as if they were convicted of managing life with bad judgment, or of some moral delinquency. With the spreading scientific conviction that health is a matter largely under each person's control, that even inherited tendencies to disease need not be allowed to run their riotous course unchecked, there comes an earnest purpose to be strong and free. Fascinating fields of knowledge are waiting to be explored; possibilities of doing, as well as of knowing, are on every side; new and dear friendships enlarge and sweeten dreams of future study and work, and the young student cannot afford quivering nerves or small lungs or an aching head any more than bad taste, rough manners, or a weak will. Handicapped by inheritance or bad training, she finds the plan of college life itself her supporter and friend. The steady, long-continued routine of mental work, physical exercise, recreation, and sleep, the simple and wholesome food, in place of irregular and unstudied diet, work out salvation for her. Instead of being left to go out of doors when she feels like it, the regular training of the gymnasium, the boats on lake and river, the tennis court, the golf links, the basket ball, the bicycle, the long walk among the woods in search of botanical or geological specimens,--all these and many more call to the busy student, until she realizes that they have their rightful place in every well-ordered day of every month. So she learns, little by little, that buoyant health is a precious possession to be won and kept.

It is significant that already statistical investigation in this country and in England shows that the standard of health is higher among the women who hold college degrees than among any other equal number of the same age and class. And it is interesting also to observe to what sort of questions our recent girl graduates have been inclined to devote attention. They have been largely the neglected problems of little children and their health, of home sanitation, of food and its choice and preparation, of domestic service, of the cleanliness of schools and public buildings. Colleges for girls are pledged by their very constitution to make persistent war on the water cure, the nervine retreat, the insane asylum, the hospital,--those bitter fruits of the emotional lives of thousands of women. "I can never afford a sick headache again, life is so interesting and there is so much to do," a delicate girl said to me at the end of her first college year. And while her mother was in a far-off invalid retreat, she undertook the battle against fate with the same intelligence and courage which she put into her calculus problems and her translations of Sophocles. Her beautiful home and her rosy and happy children prove the measure of her hard-won success. Formerly the majority of physicians had but one question for the mother of the nervous and delicate girl, "Does she go to school?" And only one prescription, "Take her out of school." Never a suggestion as to suppers of pickles and pound-cake, never a hint about midnight dancing and hurried daytime ways. But now the sensible doctor asks, "What are her interests? What are her tastes? What are her habits?" And he finds new interests for her, and urges the formation of out-of-door tastes and steady occupation for the mind, in order to draw the morbid girl from herself into the invigorating world outside. This the college does largely through its third gift of friendship.

Until a girl goes away from home to school or college, her friends are chiefly chosen for her by circumstances. Her young relatives, her neighbors in the same street, those who happen to go to the same school or church,--these she makes her girlish intimates. She goes to college with the entire conviction, half unknown to herself, that her father's political party contains all the honest men, her mother's social circle all the true ladies, her church all the real saints of the community. And the smaller the town, the more absolute is her belief. But in college she finds that the girl who earned her scholarship in the village school sits beside the banker's daughter; the New England farmer's child rooms next the heiress of a Hawaiian sugar plantation; the daughters of the opposing candidates in a sharply fought election have grown great friends in college boats and laboratories; and before her diploma is won she realizes how much richer a world she lives in than she ever dreamed of at home. The wealth that lies in differences has dawned upon her vision. It is only when the rich and poor sit down together that either can understand how the Lord is the Maker of them all.

To-day above all things we need the influence of men and women of friendliness, of generous nature, of hospitality to new ideas, in short, of social imagination. But instead, we find each political party bitterly calling the other dishonest, each class suspicious of the intentions of the other, and in social life the pettiest standards of conduct. Is it not well for us that the colleges all over the country still offer to their fortunate students a society of the most democratic sort,--one in which a father's money, a mother's social position, can assure no distinction and make no close friends? Here capacity of every kind counts for its full value. Here enthusiasm waits to make heroes of those who can lead. Here charming manners, noble character, amiable temper, scholarly power, find their full opportunity and inspire such friendships as are seldom made afterward. I have forgotten my chemistry, and my classical philology cannot bear examination; but all round the world there are men and women at work, my intimates of college days, who have made the wide earth a friendly place to me. Of every creed, of every party, in far-away places and in near, the thought of them makes me more courageous in duty and more faithful to opportunity, though for many years we may not have had time to write each other a letter. The basis of all valuable and enduring friendships is not accident or juxtaposition, but tastes, interests, habits, work, ambitions. It is for this reason that to college friendship clings a romance entirely its own. One of the friends may spend her days in the laboratory, eagerly chasing the shy facts that hide beyond the microscope's fine vision, and the other may fill her hours and her heart with the poets and the philosophers; one may steadfastly pursue her way toward the command of a hospital, and the other toward the world of letters and of art; these divergences constitute no barrier, but rather an aid to the fulness of friendship. And the fact that one goes in a simple gown which she has earned and made herself, and the other lives when at home in a merchant's modern palace--what has that to do with the things the girls care about and the dreams they talk over in the walk by the river or the bicycle ride through country roads? If any young man to-day goes through Harvard lonely, neglected, unfriended, if any girl lives solitary and wretched in her life at Wellesley, it is their own fault. It must be because they are suspicious, unfriendly, or disagreeable themselves. Certainly it is true that in the associations of college life, more than in any other that the country can show, what is extraneous, artificial, and temporary falls away, and the every-day relations of life and work take on a character that is simple, natural, genuine. And so it comes about that the fourth gift of college life is ideals of personal character.

To some people the shaping ideals of what character should be, often held unconsciously, come from the books they read; but to the majority they are given by the persons whom they most admire before they are twenty years old. The greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. The college professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them--ah, they were few, and I am sure I did not have a dozen conversations with them outside their classrooms--gave me, each in his different way, an ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which they and I were totally unconscious at the time. For many years I have known that my study with them, no matter whether of philosophy or of Greek, of mathematics or history or English, enlarged my notions of life, uplifted my standards of culture, and so inspired me with new possibilities of usefulness and of happiness. Not the facts and theories that I learned so much as the men who taught me, gave this inspiration. The community at large is right in saying that it wants the personal influence of professors on students, but it is wholly wrong in assuming that this precious influence comes from frequent meetings or talks on miscellaneous subjects. There is quite as likely to be a quickening force in the somewhat remote and mysterious power of the teacher who devotes himself to amassing treasures of scholarship, or to patiently working out the best methods of teaching; who standing somewhat apart, still remains an ideal of the Christian scholar, the just, the courteous man or woman. To come under the influence of one such teacher is enough to make college life worth while. A young man who came to Harvard with eighty cents in his pocket, and worked his way through, never a high scholar, and now in a business which looks very commonplace, told me the other day that he would not care to be alive if he had not gone to college. His face flushed as he explained how different his days would have been if he had not known two of his professors. "Do you use your college studies in your business?" I asked. "Oh, no!" he answered. "But I am another man in doing the business; and when the day's work is done I live another life because of my college experiences. The business and I are both the better for it every day." How many a young girl has had her whole horizon extended by the changed ideals she gained in college! Yet this is largely because the associations and studies there are likely to give her permanent interests--the fifth and perhaps the greatest gift of college life of which I shall speak.

The old fairy story which charmed us in childhood ended with "And they were married and lived happy ever after." It conducted to the altar, having brought the happy pair through innumerable difficulties, and left us with the contented sense that all the mistakes and problems would now vanish and life be one long day of unclouded bliss. I have seen devoted and intelligent mothers arrange their young daughters' education and companionships precisely on this basis. They planned as if these pretty and charming girls were going to live only twenty or twenty-five years at the utmost, and had consequently no need of the wealthy interests that should round out the fullgrown woman's stature, making her younger in feeling at forty than at twenty, and more lovely and admired at eighty than at either.

Emerson in writing of beauty declares that "the secret of ugliness consists not in irregular outline, but in being uninteresting. We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, or invention exists in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. Beauty without grace is the head without the body. Beauty without expression tires." Of course such considerations can hardly come with full force to the young girl herself, who feels aged at eighteen, and imagines that the troubles and problems of life and thought are hers already. "Oh, tell me to-night," cried a college freshman once to her president, "which is the right side and which is the wrong side of this Andover question about eschatology?" The young girl is impatient of open questions, and irritated at her inability to answer them. Neither can she believe that the first headlong zest with which she throws herself into society, athletics, into everything which comes in her way, can ever fail. But her elders know, looking on, that our American girl, the comrade of her parents and of her brothers and their friends, brought up from babyhood in the eager talk of politics and society, of religious belief, of public action, of social responsibility--that this typical girl, with her quick sympathies, her clear head, her warm heart, her outreaching hands, will not permanently be satisfied or self-respecting, though she have the prettiest dresses and hats in town, or the most charming of dinners, dances, and teas. Unless there comes to her, and comes early, the one chief happiness of life,--a marriage of comradeship,--she must face for herself the question, "What shall I do with my life?"

I recall a superb girl of twenty as I overtook her one winter morning hurrying along Commonwealth Avenue. She spoke of a brilliant party at a friend's the previous evening. "But, oh!" she cried, throwing up her hands in a kind of hopeless impatience, "tell me what to do. My dancing days are over!" I laughed at her, "Have you sprained your ankle?" But I saw I had made a mistake when she added, "It is no laughing matter. I have been out three years. I have not done what they expected of me," with a flush and a shrug, "and there is a crowd of nice girls coming on this winter; and anyway, I am so tired of going to teas and ball-games and assemblies! I don't care the least in the world for foreign missions, and," with a stamp, "I am not going slumming among the Italians. I have too much respect for the Italians. And what shall I do with the rest of my life?" That was a frank statement of what any girl of brains or conscience feels, with more or less bitter distinctness, unless she marries early, or has some pressing work for which she is well trained.

Yet even if that which is the profession of woman _par excellence_ be hers, how can she be perennially so interesting a companion to her husband and children as if she had keen personal tastes, long her own, and growing with her growth? Indeed, in that respect the condition of men is almost the same as that of women. It would be quite the same were it not for the fact that a man's business or profession is generally in itself a means of growth, of education, of dignity. He leans his life against it. He builds his home in the shadow of it. It binds his days together in a kind of natural piety, and makes him advance in strength and nobility as he "fulfils the common round, the daily task." And that is the reason why men in the past, if they have been honorable men, have grown old better than women. Men usually retain their ability longer, their mental alertness and hospitality. They add fine quality to fine quality, passing from strength to strength and preserving in old age whatever has been best in youth. It was a sudden recognition of this fact which made a young friend of mine say last winter, "I am not going to parties any more; the men best worth talking with are too old to dance."

Even with the help of a permanent business or profession, however, the most interesting men I know are those who have an avocation as well as a vocation. I mean a taste or work quite apart from the business of life. This revives, inspires, and cultivates them perpetually. It matters little what it is, if only it is real and personal, is large enough to last, and possesses the power of growth. A young sea-captain from a New England village on a long and lonely voyage falls upon a copy of Shelley. Appeal is made to his fine but untrained mind, and the book of the boy poet becomes the seaman's university. The wide world of poetry and of the other fine arts is opened, and the Shelleyian specialist becomes a cultivated, original, and charming man. A busy merchant loves flowers, and in all his free hours studies them. Each new spring adds knowledge to his knowledge, and his friends continually bring him their strange discoveries. With growing wealth he cultivates rare and beautiful plants, and shares them with his fortunate acquaintances. Happy the companion invited to a walk or a drive with such observant eyes, such vivid talk! Because of this cheerful interest in flowers, and this ingenious skill in dealing with them, the man himself is interesting. All his powers are alert, and his judgment is valued in public life and in private business. Or is it more exact to say that because he is the kind of man who would insist upon having such interests outside his daily work, he is still fresh and young and capable of growth at an age when many other men are dull and old and certain that the time of decay is at hand?

There are two reasons why women need to cultivate these large and abiding interests even more persistently than men. In the first place, they have more leisure. They are indeed the only leisured class in the country, the only large body of persons who are not called upon to win their daily bread in direct, wage-earning ways. As yet, fortunately, few men among us have so little self-respect as to idle about our streets and drawing-rooms because their fathers are rich enough to support them. We are not without our unemployed poor; but roving tramps and idle clubmen are after all not of large consequence. Our serious non-producing classes are chiefly women. It is the regular ambition of the chivalrous American to make all the women who depend on him so comfortable that they need do nothing for themselves. Machinery has taken nearly all the former occupations of women out of the home into the shop and factory. Widespread wealth and comfort, and the inherited theory that it is not well for the woman to earn money so long as father or brothers can support her, have brought about a condition of things in which there is social danger, unless with the larger leisure are given high and enduring interests. To health especially there is great danger, for nothing breaks down a woman's health like idleness and its resulting ennui. More people, I am sure, are broken down nervously because they are bored, than because they are overworked; and more still go to pieces through fussiness, unwholesome living, worry over petty details, and the daily disappointments which result from small and superficial training. And then, besides the danger to health, there is the danger to character. I need not dwell on the undermining influence which men also feel when occupation is taken away and no absorbing private interest fills the vacancy. The vices of luxurious city life are perhaps hardly more destructive to character than is the slow deterioration of barren country life. Though the conditions in the two cases are exactly opposite, the trouble is often the same,--absence of noble interests. In the city restless idleness organizes amusement; in the country deadly dulness succeeds daily toil.