ll find it intensified; that so long
as men and women live, they may, if they desire, they _must_, if they
are faithful, grow more manly and more womanly. If they draw nearer to
each other, as they sit hand in hand looking towards the sunset, it is
only because they are both heirs of the immortal, seeking and gaining
the same end.

It is impossible to dismiss these considerations without touching afresh
the subject of co-education. But we need not rest upon the family fact
or the old common school system.

Oberlin was the pioneer in the system of co-education, a system into
which she was forced, not so much by fanatical theories as by the cruel
hand of poverty. For forty-one years she has held up her banner in the
wilderness, and in 1868 I found her with nearly twelve hundred pupils.
It was very largely to her men and women that the country owed its
safety in the last war. As governors of States, generals of armies, and
mothers of families, or teachers of schools, they kept the nation to its
duty. From this beginning twenty-five colleges had sprung in 1868. It is
nothing to the argument that these colleges may not present as high a
standard of classical attainment as Harvard or Yale, if that should turn
out to be the fact. For more than thirty years a large number of them
have been proving the possibility of co-education, and their graduates
are not the unhappy childless women of Massachusetts, but the happy and
healthy women of the West, who are strong in proportion as they are
busy, and whose "children are plenty as blackberries." Beside these
twenty-five colleges, Antioch has been working steadily for twenty-four
years, and in addition to the small institutions scattered all through
New York and the Middle States, Cornell has lately opened her doors to
the same system. All those who have practical experience of its results
know how much wiser, sweeter, and more serene is the life that is shaped
by its methods.

It is a subject on which argument is alike useless and undesirable. We
must observe and be guided by the practical result.

We are told that public duties are more exacting than private. No woman
will be found to believe it. It may be often difficult to estimate the
heavy stake that underlies the small duty.

"A man must labor till set of sun,
But a woman's work is never done;"

and while this distich hints at the truth, it is certain that private
life will continue to make upon her as heavy dem