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methods were without discipline, and the result was inefficient. The opening of the college also resulted in the establishment of a system of preparatory education.. The mission of Vassar College in its first years was of the highest consequence in impressing the importance of orderliness upon secondary schools. It was made plain that the preparation for college, like the institution itself, was based upon certain principles which were to be followed without regard to the crude opinions of parents or the fancies of students.

In addition to the education of women through coeducation and through separate colleges, the community has, in a few of its older institutions, determined to make use of these institutions for the giving of an education to women. Such a method is a normal result of the desire to promote the efficiency of each educational agency. It also represents the transit of the English tradition. Girton and Newnham at Cambridge, and Sommerville Hall, Lady Margaret Hall, and St. Hugh's Hall at Oxford, represent the origin of coördination and affiliation in American institutions. Girton College had been in existence nine years before the foundation of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women was organized in Cambridge in 1879. This third method is usually known by the name of coordination or affiliation. It represents usually the affiliation of a college for women with a college for men in the same university. These affiliations differ somewhat. Among the more significant of these institutions are: Radcliffe College, affiliated with Harvard, which was opened in the year 1879; Barnard, affiliated with Columbia; the Woman's College of Brown University, of Providence; the College for Women of Western Reserve University, of Cleveland; and the H. Sophia Newcomb College, affiliated with Tulane University, of New Orleans. In certain of these colleges, like Radcliffe, Barnard, and Brown, the larger part of the instruction is given by members of the Faculty of the older college for men. In the College for Women of Western Reserve University, the Faculty is coördinate with the Faculty of the Adelbert College for men in the same University.

Each of these three methods-the coeducational, the separate, and the coördinate-has advantages, and is subject to disadvan

tages. The discussions of the last years of the seventh and the first years of the eight decade regarding the worthiness or the unworthiness of coeducation and of separate education have largely ceased. It has come to be acknowledged that each method has its own special mission for the community.

After more than a generation of the higher education of women, many questions which were asked at the beginning of the period have either been answered or have ceased to be asked. Many of the perils which were prophesied have ceased to be dangerous, or time has proved that they were no perils at all.

It was at the beginning feared that the physical health of women would suffer. It was thought that the conscientiousness of students would lead to overwork and to worry. It was believed that the endeavor to do men's work with what a woman has called the handicap of sex, that functional disturbances, that the traditional dislike of exercise, combined with hard scholastic labor, might result in physical breakdown. Experience of more than forty years has proved, however, that in case a woman enter college in good health and in case she use ordinary wisdom, she should leave college with health not only unimpaired but made more vigorous. The increasing athletic spirit and a greater wisdom on the part of college authorities in the matter of regulations and of diet have vastly contributed to the increase of health.

The fear was also current that the intellectual capacity of women would depreciate scholarship. It has been proved that, in the coeducational institutions, women maintain a scholastic rank slightly higher than that of men. A higher moral standard, a greater diligence, the refusal to be absorbed in athletic sports, contribute to this result. The result in America of the relatively higher standing of women over men is similar to that proved by the class lists of the honor examinations of Oxford and Cambridge.

It has also become apparent that the great interests of the family have not been made to suffer by reason of the education of women. The college has not diverted women from marriage. Education has, of course, helped to prepare women for many vocations besides matrimony. They have become teachers, phy

sicians, librarians, secretaries, missionaries, but a larger part have married. Not far from fifty per cent of women who are graduates of American colleges marry.

The following table is significant :

To my associate, Dr. George W. Moorehouse, I am indebted for the table. I have also received aid from him in making certain general judgments on this subject.

The significance, however, of this table relates in large measure to the percentage of women who are not graduates who marry. This percentage is extremely difficult to determine. Certain facts are, however, evident. College graduates marry, on the whole, about two years later than those who are not graduates. There is also some reason to believe that a smaller relative number of college women marry than of those who are not college women. If this conclusion be true, there are certain reasons in explanation. A college education increases earning power. Education also enriches the intellectual life. In consequence, a higher ideal of the marriage state is gained. A consequent unwillingness to enter this state is evident. It is also worthy of question whether the women who enter college have not, in advance of their entering, more or less provisionally determined that they are not to marry. Yet, be it said, that the question of matrimony has

probably made no distinct appeal to most girls who are passing their entrance examinations.

The statistics which have been collected seem to prove that a larger proportion of the college women of the western states than of the eastern are married. The reason of this fact is that the drift of population is westward. Men are more mobile than women. As a consequence, women who are married are more mobile than women who are unmarried. Therefore a larger proportion of married graduates are found in the west.

Out of his long and rich experience H. Clarke Seelye, the president of Smith College, bears testimony to the fact that women who are graduates are better qualified both for wifehood and for motherhood. They are as ready to wed as other women when the right man wooes them; but many causes now lead men in active life to postpone marriage, and the longer it is postponed, the less inclined they are to assume its responsibilities. Women cannot take the initiative and seek a husband, and daughters, in this country at least, are no longer contracted in marriage by their parents.

Marriages of convenience are not made so often by college graduates, for they do not feel obliged to marry in order to escape poverty or dependence, and they marry more frequently educated men who desire congenial companionship. There are accordingly fewer divorces among them. Their children are limited by the same causes which are dominant in the society to which they belong. Excessive mentality may interfere with fecundity, but the fact is, there is very little excessive mentality at present, either in colleges for men or for women.

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"Annual Report of the President of Smith College," 1904-5, p. 12.

CHAPTER XVI

THE COLLEGES IN THE CIVIL WAR

THE higher, the larger, the finer the motive, the greater is the appeal which it makes to the heart of the college man. The universities have always been the nurseries of the richest spirit of humanity. In feudal times they were a protest against feudalism, and in modern times and all over the modern world they have embodied the aggressive spirit. Liberty, largeness, humanity, have been the rallying cries of college students. The universities were on the side of the people in the struggles for democracy in France. They fought for national unity in Italy. And at the present time in Russia and in America they represent the spirit not only of enlightened freedom but also of the most serious and exultant endeavor for securing national progress. was a very moving spectacle which was furnished by the great Fichte in the University of Berlin, of which he was the first rector and in a sense the founder, eager to lead forth his students to repel the invasion by Napoleon in the year 1813; and prevented only by the command of his king.

The nobility of the motive which has characterized the appeal that humanity has made to the universities of the old world in former times received its highest illustration in the great civil war of the United States. The motive appealing to the North and to the South was of the highest character. The North fought for the preservation of the Union, the South for the freedom of its individual States. This war, therefore, made an appeal of tre mendous force to the students of the colleges of both the North and the South. To the student in Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth, in Hamilton and in Michigan, the war was a call for the defense of the Union, for the protection of the government, for the freedom of native land. To the student in the Universities of Virginia, of North Carolina, and of Georgia the war was a