subordination of private wishes to the public good, if, under the advice and leadership of those selected as fittest persons for the executive chair, the whole subject of free and universal education should be elevated to the plane of organic law, and be as sacred and irremovable as any of the fundamental muniments of liberty.

Yours, truly,

CALIFORNIA.

J. L. M. CURRY.

EDUCATING GIRLS.

[Communicated to the Boston Sunday Journal by President David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University.]

The subject of the higher education of young women at present usually demands answers to these three questions:

1. Shall a girl receive a college education?

2. Shall she receive the same kind of a college education as a boy?

3. Shall she be educated in the same college?

First. Shall a girl receive a college education? The answer to this must depend on the character of the girl. Precisely so with the boy. What we should do with either depends on his or her possibilities. Wise parents will not let either boy or girl enter life with any less preparations than the best they can receive. It is true that many college graduates, boys and girls alike, do not amount to much after the schools have done the best they can with them. It is true, as I have elsewhere insisted, that "you can not fasten a $2,000 education to a 50-cent boy," nor to a 50-cent girl, either. But there is also great truth in these words of Frederic Dennison Maurice: "I know that nine-tenths of those the university sends out must be howers of wood and drawers of water. But if we train the ten-tenths to be so, then the wood will be badly cut and the water will be spilt. Aim at something noble; make your system of education such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be manhood in your little men of which you do not dream."

It is not alone the preparation of great men for great things. Higher education may prepare even little men for greater things than they would have otherwise found possible. And so it is with the education of women. The needs of the times are imperative. The noblest result of social evolution is the growth of the civilized home. Such a home only a wise, cultivated, and high-minded woman can make. To furnish such women is one of the noblest missions of higher education. No young women capable of becoming such should be condemned to a lower destiny. Even of those seemingly too dull or too vacillating to reach any high ideal of wisdom, this may be said, that it does no harm to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an experiment of such moment. Four of the best years of one's life spent in the company of noble thoughts and high ideals can not fail to leave their impress. To be wise, and at the same time womanly, is to wield a tremendous influence, which may be felt for good in the lives of generations to come. It is not forms of government by which men are made or unmade. It is the character and influence of their mothers and wives. The higher education of women means more for the future than all conceivable legislative reforms. And its influence does not stop with the home. It means higher standards of manhood, greater thoroughness of training and the coming of better men. Therefore, let us educate our girls as well as our boys. A generous education should be the birthright of every daughter of the Republic as well as of every son.

Second. Shall we give our girls the same education as our boys? Yes and no. If we mean by the same an equal degree of breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness for high thinking and wise acting, yes, let it be the same. If we mean to reach this end by exactly the same course of studies, then my answer must be no. For the same course of study will not yield the same results with different persons. The ordinary "college course" which has been handed down from generation to genera tion is purely conventional. It is a result of a series of compromises in trying to fit the traditional education of clergymen and gentlemen to the needs of men of a different social era. The old college course met the special needs of nobody, and therefore was adapted to all alike. The great educational awakening of the last twenty years in America has come from breaking the bonds of this old system. The essence of the new education is individualism. Its purpose is to give to each young man that training which will make a man of him. Not the training which a century or two ago helped to civilize the masses of boys of that time, but that which will civilize this particular boy. One reason why the college students of 1895 are ten to one in number as compared with those of 1875, is that the college training now given is valuable to ten times as many men as could be reached or helped by the narrow courses of twenty years ago.

In the university of to-day the largest liberty of choice in study is given to the

student. The professor advises, the student chooses, and the flexibility of the courses makes it possible for every form of talent to receive proper culture. Because the college, of to-day helps ten times as many men as that of yesterday could hope to reach, it is ten times as valuable. The difference lies in the development of special lines of work and in the growth of the elective system. The power of choice carries the duty of choosing rightly. The ability to choose has made a man out of the college boy, and transferred college work from an alternation of tasks and play to its proper relation to the business of life. Meanwhile, the old ideals have not risen in value. If our colleges were to go back to threshing the cut straw of medievalism-in other words, to their work of twenty years ago-their professors would speak to empty benches. In those colleges which still cling to those traditions these benches are empty to day or filled only with idlers. This to a college is a fate worse than death.

The best education for a young woman is surely not that which has proved unfit for the young man. She is an individual as well as he, and her work gains as much as his by relating it to her life. But an institution broad enough to meet the varied needs of varied men can also meet the varied needs of the varied woman. Intellectual training is the prime function of the college. The intellectual needs of men and women are not different in many important respects. The special or professional needs so far as they are different will bring their own satisfaction. Those who have had to do with the higher training of women know that the severest demands can be met by them as well as by men. There is no demand for easy or "goody-goody" courses of study for women except as this demand has been made or encouraged by men.

There are, of course, certain average differences between men and women as students. Women have often greater sympathy, greater readiness of memory or apprehension, greater fondness for technique. In the languages and literature, often in mathematics and history, women are found to excel. They lack, on the whole, originality. They are not attracted by unsolved problems, and in the inductive or "inexact sciences they seldom take the lead. In the traditional courses of study, traditional for men, they are often very successful. Not that these courses have a special fitness for women, but that women are more docile and less critical as to the purposes of education. And to all these statements there are many exceptions. In this, however, those who have taught both men and women must agree. The training of women is just as serious and just as important as the training of men, and no training is adequate for either which falls short of the best.

Third. Shall women be taught in the same classes as men? This is, it seems to me, not a fundamental question, but rather a matter of taste. It does no harm whatever to either men or women to meet those of the other sex in the same class rooms. But if they prefer not to do so, let them do otherwise. Considerable has been said for and against the union in one institution of technical schools and schools of liberal arts. The technical character of scientific work is emphasized by its separation from general culture. But I believe better men are made where the two are not separated. The devotees of culture studies gain from the feeling reality and utility cultivated by technical work. The technical students gain from association with men and influences whose aggregate tendency is toward greater breadth of sympathy and a higher point of view.

A woman's college is more or less distinctly a technical school. In most cases its purpose is distinctly stated to be such. It is a school for training for the profession of womanhood. It encourages womanliness of thought as something more or less different from the plain thinking which is often called manly.

The brightest work in women's colleges is often accompanied by a nervous strain as though the students or teachers were fearful of falling short of some expected standard. They are often working toward ideals set by others. The best work of men is natural and unconscious, the normal product of the contact of the mind with the problem in question. On the whole, calmness and strength in woman's work are best reached through coeducation.

At the present time the demand for the higher education of women is met in three different ways:

1. In separate colleges for women, with courses of study more or less parallel with those given in colleges for men. In some of these the teachers are all women, in some mostly men, and in others a more or less equal division obtains. In nearly all of these institutions the old traditions of education and discipline are more prevalent than in colleges for men. Nearly all of them retain some trace of religious or denominational control. In all of them the Zeitgeist is producing more or less commotion, and the changes in their evolution are running parallel with those in colleges for

men.

2. In women's annexes to colleges for men. In these, part of the instruction given to the men is repeated to the women, in different classes or rooms, and there is more ED 9541

or less opportunity to use the same libraries and museums. In some other institutions the relations are closer, the privileges of study being similar, the differences being mainly in the rules of conduct by which the young women are hedged in, the young men making their own regulations.

It seems to me that the annex system can not be a permanent one. The annex student does not get the best of the institution, and the best is none too good for her. Sooner or later she will demand it, or go where the best can be found. The best students will cease to go to the annex. The institution must then admit women on equal terms or not admit them at all. There is certainly no educational reason why women should prefer the antiex of one institution if another institution equally good throws its doors wide open for her.

3. The third system is that of coeducation. In this relation young men and young women are admitted to the same classes, subjected to the same requirements, and governed by the same rules. This system is now fully established in the State institutions of the North and West, and in most other colleges of the same region. Its effectiveness has long since passed beyond question among those familiar with its operation. Other things being equal, the young men are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. The women do their work in a more natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than when isolated from the influence and society of men. There is less of silliness and folly when a man ceases to be a novelty. There is less attraction exerted by idle and frivolous girls when young men meet also girls industrious and serious. In coeducational institutions of high standards frivolous conduct or scandals of any form are unknown. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility. Many professors have entered Western colleges with strong prejudices against coeducation. These prejudices have in no case endured the test of experience. What is well done has a tonic effect on the mind and character. The college girl has long since ceased to expect any particular leniency because she is a girl. She stands or falls with the character of her work.

It is not true that the standard of college work has been in any way lowered by coeducation. The reverse is decidedly the case. It is true, however, that untimely zeal of one sort or another has filled our Western States with a host of so-called colleges. It is true that most of these are weak, and doing poor work in poor ways. It is true that most of these are coeducational. It is also true that the great majority of their students are not of college grade at all. In such schools often low standards prevail, both as to scholarships and as to manners. The student fresh from the country, with no preparatory training, will bring the manners of his home. These are not always good manners, as manners are judged in society. But none of these defects are derived from coeducation, nor are any of these conditions in any way made worse by it.

A final question: Does not coeducation lead to marriage? Most certainly it does, and this fact need not be and can not be denied. But such marriages are not usually premature. And it is certainly true that no better marriages can be inade than those founded on common interests and intellectual friendships.

A college man who has known college women is not drawn to women of lower ideals and inferior training. He is likely to be strongly drawn toward the best he has known. A college woman is not led by mere propinquity to accept the attentions of inferior men. Among some thirty college professors educated in coeducational colleges, as Cornell, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, whose records are before me, twothirds have married college friends. Most of the others have married women from other colleges, and a few chosen women from their own colleges, but not contemporary with themselves. In all cases the college man has chosen a college woman, and in all cases both man and woman are thoroughly happy with the outcome of coeducation. It is part of the legitimate function of higher education to prepare women as well as men for happy and successful lives.

CONNECTICUT.

THE TENDENCY OF MEN TO LIVE IN CITIES.

[Address of President Kingsbury, of the American Social Science Association. Read September 2, 1895.]

Two or three years since I wrote this title as a memorandum for a paper which I wished to prepare when I should find time sufficient to make some necessary investigations, statistical and otherwise. I knew of nothing, or almost nothing, written on the subject, except by way of occasional allusion. I made many inquiries in various directions, personally and by letter, of those who would, I thought, be likely to give me information; I examined libraries and catalogues-and all this with very trifling results. To-day, when I again take up the theme, so much has been written

on the subject that the question has almost passed from the stage of generalization to that of specialization and detail.

In the April number of the Atlantic Magazine of the present year an article commenting on Dr. Albert Shaw's recent work, entitled "Municipal government in Great Britain," says:

"The great fact in the social development of the white race at the close of the nineteenth century is the tendency all over the world to concentrate in great cities." Doubtless this is true; but it is not a new, or even a modern tendency, although, as we shall see, there is much in modern civilization which tends to increase and accentuate it. Still, when the earliest dawn of authentic history sheds its pale light on the impenetrable darkness which lies beyond, it shows us cities as large, as magnificent, as luxurious, as wicked, and apparently as old as any that the world has since known. The books speak of Babylon as the largest city the world has ever seen; but it was by no means the first, and may not have been the greatest even then. Nineveh, its great rival, Memphis, Thebes, Damascus, claiming to be the oldest of them all, Rome, in a later time, with its two or three millions of inhabitants, are but representatives of other cities by the thousands, perhaps larger and older than the largest and oldest here named, and are certainly sufficient to show that a tendency in men to live congregated together in large numbers is as old as anything that we know about the human race.

In our earliest literature, too, we find, apparently well fixed, some of the same prejudices against the city as a place for men to dwell in that now exist. These prejudices must have been already existing for a long time, and their influence must have been the subject of observation before even the possibly somewhat prejudiced people who did not live in cities should have arrived at such firmly settled conclusions in regard to their deleterious influence. Curiously enough, the prejudico appears in one of our earliest writings. These is no doubt that the writer of the Book of Genesis had what might be called an unfriendly feeling toward Cain. He gives him a bad character in every respect. He holds him up to the universal contempt of mankind, and visits him with the severest judgments of God. And, after he has said about him nearly every bad thing that he can think of, he adds as a climax to his enormities, "And Cain builded a city." Now, whether he meant to be understood that cities, having been first built by such an infamous scoundrel, had turned out to be very much what you might expect, or whether, the general character of cities having been already settled in his mind, it was adding one more black mark to Cain to mention this fact, is by no means clear; but this much is certain, that the writer was no admirer of cities, and that neither Cain nor cities were intended to derive any credit from his statement. From that day to this they have had their severe critics. They have been regarded as the breeding places of vice and the refuge of crime. Our own Jefferson-that is, Thomas, not Joseph-is said to have called them "ulcers on the body politic." Dr. Andrew D. White, in his address as president of this association delivered in 1891, says, "Our cities are the rotten spots in our body politic, from which, if we are not careful, decay is to spread throughout our whole country; for cities make and spread opinions, fashions, ideals." The poet Cowley says, "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain." And other writers with the same feelings have used language of a similar import, dictated by the warmth of their temperament, the range of their vocabulary, and the power of their rhetoric.

Prof. Max Nordau, who has lately shown us in a large octavo of 650 pages how we are all hastening on to certain destruction-a conclusion which I am not disposed to combat-or perhaps I might more modestly say, as the late President Woolsey is reported to have said to Daniel A. Pratt, the great American traveler, when he laid before him some rather startling propositions, that I would rather give him a dollar than to attempt to point out the fallacy in his argument-Mr. Nordau, after quoting high authority to show how the human race is poisoning itself with alcohol, tobacco, opium, hasheesh, arsenic, and tainted food, says:

"To these noxious influences, however, one more may be added, which Morel [the authority he has just quoted] has not known or has not taken into consideration; namely, residence in large towns. The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, who is surrounded by the greatest luxury, is continually exposed to unfavorable influences which diminish his vital powers far more than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, aud one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabitant of a marshy district. The effect of a large town on the human organism offers the closest analogy to that of the Maremma, and its population falls victim to the same fatality of degeneracy and destruction as the victims of malaria. The death rate in a large town is more than a quarter greater than the average for the entire population. It is double that of the open country, though in reality it ought to be less, since in a large town the most vigorous ages predominate, during which the mortality is lower than in infancy

and old age. And the children of large towns who are not carried off at an early age suffer from the peculiar arrested development which Morel has ascertained in the population of fever districts. They develop more or less normally until they are 14 or 15 years of age, are up to that time alert, sometimes brilliantly endowed, and give the highest promise. Then suddenly there is a standstill. The mind loses its facility of comprehension; and the boy, who only yesterday was a model scholar, becomes an obtuse, clumsy dunce, who can only be steered with the greatest difficulty through his examinations. With these mental changes bodily modifications go hand in hand. The growth of the long bones is extremely slow or ceases entirely, the legs remain short, the pelvis retains a feminine form, certain other organs cease to develop, and the entire being presents a strange and repulsive mixture of uncompleteness and decay. Now, we know how in the last generation the number of inhabitants of great towns increased to an extraordinary degree. At the present time an incomparably larger portion of the whole population is subjected to the destructive influences of large towns than was the case fifty years ago. the number of victims is proportionately more striking, and continually becomes more remarkable. Parallel with growth of large towns is the increase in the number of the degenerate of all kinds, criminals, lunatics, and the higher degenerates of Magnan; and it is natural that these last should play an ever more prominent part in endeavoring to introduce an ever greater element of insanity into art and literature."

Hence

Many people think Nordau like the patient in the asylum. He thinks everybody crazy except himself. But Dr. Walter B. Platt, in a paper read before this associa tion in 1887, points out certain dangers to the constitution to which every dweller in cities is of necessity exposed from physical causes, specially mentioning disuse of the upper extremities, the exposure to incessant noise and its cumulative effect on the whole nervous system, the jarring of the brain and spinal cord by a continual treading upon unyielding pavements. And he adds that good authorities assert that there are very few families now living in London who with their predecessors have resided there continuously for three generations; but he excepts from the operations of these deleterious influences those whose circumstances are such as to enable them to spend a considerable portion of each year in the country.

Dr. Grace Peckham, in a paper read before this association in 1885, says: "However it was arrived at, the census of 1880 shows that the infant mortality of cities in this country is twice as great as that of the rural districts."

Everyone who has taken an interest in Mr. Charles Loring Brace's great work in the city of New York knows that his firm belief was that the salvation of the city poor depended on getting the surplus into country homes; and few men have been more competent to judge or more ready to look at all sides of a case than he. The literature of the slums is full of every human horror; and it would seem as if any change must be for the better.

Dr. Josiah Strong, in that vigorous presentation of the dangers of our American civilization entitled Our Country, says: "The city has become a serious menace to our civilization, because in it each of our dangers is enhanced and all are localized. It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant. In 1880 our fifty principal cities contained 39.3 per cent of our German population and 45.8 per cent of our Irish. Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched. Dives and Lazarus are brought face to face." Speaking of Dives and Lazarus, has Dives had what you might call quite fair play? Even Judas has had his apologists, but I do not remember ever to have seen any speculation as to what would have become of Lazarus if he had not been fed from Dives's table. Doubtless he preferred that to the poorhouse or even to tramping; and from all accounts, he was not exactly the sort of person you would choose for a parlor boarder. This, however, is a mere passing comment, and, I trust, will not involve me in any theologic discussion; but I do like to see even the devil have his

due.

The feature of cities which is perhaps at present attracting more attention than any other is their misgovernment. Dr. Strong begins a paragraph thus: "The government of the city is by a 'boss' who is skilled in the manipulation of the 'machine,' and who holds no political principles except for revenue only."" If a foreigner were to read that sentence he would infer that "boss" was the English for the chief magistrate of a city, but we know so well just what it means that it scarcely attracts our attention.

*

* *

One would think after reading all this about the evils of cities from the time of Cain to the last New York election, or, rather, let us say, to the last but one-and especially when we must admit that we know everything that is said to be true, and that even then not the half nor the tenth part has been told, and we are almost driven to the conclusion that nothing short of the treatment applied to Sodom and Gomorrah will meet the necessities of the case-that every sane man and woman should flee without stopping for the open country; and the women especially should be careful