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and yard thru which crops go to market; into the farm factory, where skill should add to value; into the pasture, where skill should direct form, feature, and development; into cultivation, where science should defy drouth and deluge; into fertilization, where observation and experience must be supplemented by education regarding soils and their composition.

man.

The American farmer is waiting and watching for the coming of this Are we to look for him in some one of the half-dozen institutions that are doing promising work, or will help come from as many sources, and a highway be constructed by several men who realize the needs of our country in this regard? We will look for the coming man in some state where the people see the wisdom of strengthening the producer and admonish their representatives to that effect; where boards of control appreciate the value of this work and apply endowments of state and nation to their legitimate uses.

Five thousand students attend agricultural colleges, but these colleges are feeling their way in the dark along untraveled paths. They are fitting and trying, as carpenters built barns in old times; they will at last forge out a system, by comparing notes, that will meet the requirements of producers and be entirely new and suitable to our conditions as a people.

The farmers of this country asked for and secured the endowments of 1862 for agricultural colleges for the several states and territories, and supposed that nothing more was to be done. They did not consider how students should be prepared for colleges, nor what they should do. after commencement. They forgot to ask where teachers would come from who would be competent to apply science to the farmer's work. How few teachers the world possesses! It is interesting to look back over the intervening forty years and see the things done and left undone by these colleges. How grandly some of them have overcome obstacles, and how very little others have done! They have had no university to guide them. They have run like wild trains without a time table, and some of them have used for other purposes the money Congress gave to educate the farmers. Boards of trustees and faculties, who would under no circumstances break the laws of God or man, do not hesitate a moment to substitute students in something else than the sciences relating to agriculture. Less and less of this is being done, however. The wonder grows that such far-reaching interests have not had well-defined educational facilities along every special line. Look at the array and consider the want of exact information regarding them. Soils, buildings, grasses, grains, farm animals, fibers, forests, fruits and vegetables, twenty-five billions of dollars in value. The time has fully come when educational institutions, especially in an agricultural, mining, or manufacturing state, should apply science to industry, and to this end the faculty should be constructed.

My highest conception of duty when I went to Washington was to help to strengthen the state institutions along lines of agricultural education and research. I am still of that opinion, but I found it necessary to first strengthen the scientists of the department by better facilities, apparatus, assistants, salaries, selections from outside, and education within. Some progress is being made along all these lines. State and other institutions and foreign countries are calling on us for strong men. The whole column is marching toward the position of placing our country in the front rank of producers of everything that contributes to the happiness of mankind.

I look to the educators of our country to take into consideration the producing half of the people under our flag. There is good work being done in the Missouri University toward introducing the elements of agricultural science into common and secondary schools, by holding a summer school for the education of the teachers of these schools. This is the place to begin. The average American is the product of the common school. The stream does not rise higher than its source. The teacher should have facilities to learn along these lines at the expense of the state. The faculty of the agricultural college of the state is the repository of this information, and the teachers should have their expenses paid while they are becoming possessed of it.

We need text-books regarding agricultural studies that can now be compiled from work already done by the nation and the states.

The Canadians have taken up the work of educating their teachers by grouping the schools and sending instructors to each group. The British government has been trying to educate the parochial schoolteachers, but the scope of instruction is limited. Something has been done by several institutions thru university extension work in our own country. Alabama gives $2,500 annually to support a school of agriculture in each congressional district in that state, with a view to making them feeders for their own agricultural college. Minnesota has an admirable school of agriculture, and Nebraska is well along in the work of organizing one. Wisconsin has taken the lead in the organization of short courses that will no doubt become feeders of the agricultural college. Iowa excels in animal husbandry among other things. Several of the states have well-organized and growing colleges that hold out hope of good things in the future, and several states divert the money given by Congress for the education of the farmer to education along other lines. But progress is being made in most states, the tillers of the soil are appreciating what has been done, and will not rest content until wellequipped faculties are organized in every state and territory of the Union.

We find that progress is being made toward the education of the farmer; that belief is extending regarding its necessity; that opposition is vanishing among educators whose studies did not include the science

of the farm; that demand for instructors and organizers along these lines is growing; that, as a nation, our power for good at home and abroad depends upon the education of all our citizens; and that all classes, kindreds, tongues, and peoples look to you, the educators of America, to lift the whole up to higher intellectual and moral altitudes.

THE HOME AND THEe higher EDUCATION

MRS. CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, NEW YORK CITY

Within a few days there have been graduated from our colleges and universities an estimate of between four and five thousands of young women. The fact represents the fruit of a half century of earnest and intelligent agitation in behalf of the right of women to receive the higher education and the duty of the public to provide means whereby that education may be acquired. College women are now far too numerous to be regarded as an innovation, and their achievements have been too important to consider them longer as an experiment; yet there is evidence in plenty that the college woman, her present sphere, and her future destiny still furnish a problem which vexes the spirit of many a skeptic. Within the year, if the increased number and the character of contributions upon the subject to our periodical literature is a safe criterion of public opinion, there has been a recent re-opening of the old question. The discussion, however, is upon entirely new and certainly unexpected ground. The subtle ridicule which attended the advent of the college woman has given way to cordial approval, and the world's conversion to the college. woman's right to exist seems complete.

When college women were yet rare in this country, a German professor was told that an American woman had written the best answer ever made to Edwards' "On the Will." In horror stricken tones he exclaimed in reply: "Then may Heaven forgive Christopher Columbus for having discovered America." That man represented a type common in his day, in our own country as well as in Germany. Unreasoning and intolerant. as was their attitude of mind, their opposition was founded upon honest doubt. The conversion of intolerance into tolerance, of ridicule into applause, is due to the fact that these doubts have been forever quieted by the indisputable demonstration of the fallacy of the four chief claims of the opposition.

I. Women are mentally capable of grasping a college education, and a great many women are more capable of doing so than a great many men.

2. Women are physically able to bear the continued strain of a college course, and many of them are far better able to bear it than many men.

3. The college woman has no more lost the "eternal womanly" than the college

man has lost the "eternal manly" in the struggle for education.

4. College women, like college men, have not lost their ability and desire to become homemakers, nor their willingness to obey the second law of nature, "the preservation of the species."

This demonstration seems to have been generally accepted among the educated as final. The new discussion does not dispute the right of women to receive the higher education, nor deny their ability to grasp it; nor does it seriously question the beneficial effect of the higher education upon women themselves nor upon the homes over which they preside. In fact, the new criticism represents an entire turning of the tables. The whole spirit of it seems to have been inspired by a belief that in some mysterious way men are being defrauded of their rightful prerogatives by the co-educational college women. For fifty years the extension of educational privileges to women has been a concession to the plea for the rights of women; the new question has been raised in defense of the rights of men. An impetus was undoubtedly given to the new line of thought when, in 1898, W. T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, made the prediction that if women students at colleges should continue to increase as rapidly, in proportion to men students, as they had done in the past, it would not be many years before there would be more women than men in our colleges. Following this announcement, the figures of the Commissioner's report of 1900 may have seemed ominous to those who had regarded the college woman as a negative rather than a positive factor of society. In the years between 1890 and 1900 men students in colleges increased 60.6 per cent., while women students increased 148.7 per cent. These facts have evidently frightened the conservative, and have aroused a cautious but firm opposition to co-education. The discussion has assumed sufficient importance to alarm many women who fear that the advantages won after years of serious struggle may be lost; and to lead at least three great daily newspapers to predict, editorially, that co-education will be replaced ere long by the separate school. Three incidents

have wielded a somewhat potent influence in the discussion. The first was the action taken by Adelbert College, of Cleveland, which closed its doors to women in 1888, after fifteen years' experience in co-education. The college is not of sufficient importance in itself to have added any particular weight to the discussion, had it not been for the significance of the cause which led to its act. If reports given by those who claim to know are correct, the women students were in no wise blamable for the step. Their absences from college exercises on account of sickness averaged less than half as many as those of men; their average scholarship was creditable, and during the fifteen years they had won a majority of the honors of the school. It was alleged, however, that this condition was a dangerous one, and, should women increase in numbers and improve in standing as rapidly as they had done in the past, men might prefer other schools. Women, therefore, lost their privileges at Adelbert College, not on account of their failures, as would once have been dismally prophesied, but because of their superiority. The second incident, which is of far more serious moment, since it occurred in the West, which

has been regarded as the stronghold of co-education, was the action taken by Stanford University to limit the number of women students, while the number of men students should remain unlimited. The excuse offered is the same as that given by Adelbert, that is, the possibility that women would outnumber men if the present rate of increase should continue. The third was the remarkable address of President James, in which he said: "In Northwestern University women have increased faster than men, and if the same increase continues, in ten years women will form half the student body, a condition which many friends of the University would view with concern." In this connection it is interesting to note that in the commencements of this year Cornell University graduated a class of 190 students, 75 of whom were women; Michigan University graduated 261 students, of whom 115 were women.

It is probable that the rather discourteous conduct of men students in the Chicago University toward the women students in connection with the convocation exercises, and the position taken by the men of Columbia University concerning the use of the campus and baths by the students of Barnard College, may have added force to the opinion that men students in all colleges would be glad to be rid of the presence of the women students. The very recent action of the Chicago University, in segregating the women from the men in the freshmen and sophomore classes, inexplicable by any other theory than that it has been a concession made. to the ungallant protests of the inen undergraduates, will probably strengthen this point of view. The fact that girls graduate from our graminar and high schools in considerably greater numbers than boys, and the even more significant fact that men in our nation now carry a larger per cent. of illiteracy than women, may have added to the general alarm of conservatives.

Denuded of meaningless platitudes, the opinions expressed seem to resolve themselves into a fear that a struggle for the "survival of the fittest" is going on in our educational institutions, from the lowest to the highest, with an alarming possibility that women may gain the final supremacy.

To my mind co-education will suffer little from the present flurry of opposition. The system is founded upon claims too broad, too sound, and too progressive to be dislodged without serious and fair reasons; and certainly the objections thus far offered can hardly be considered as either logical or compatible with "fair play."

Nevertheless, the position taken by these new opponents of co-education is worthy of analytical investigation. Why should the friends of any university "view with concern" the fact that half, or even more than half, its students are women? Is it because the scholarship of the women has fallen below that of men? No one claims it. Is it because they have in any way failed to meet the demands of college life? No such suggestion has been made.

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