s the
same--girls can easily do all that is required of the young men, but
they will do more. And yet the report from every college is--_more young
men break down during a course, and are obliged, from ill health, to
abandon their studies, than young women_. This certainly does not
threaten danger to girls who attempt only the same that the young men
do. The tendency in our colleges towards elective courses of study is in
the right direction to remove the dangerous temptation into which girls
are liable to fall--of taking studies outside the course. I hope to see
even greater freedom of choice.

From a woman, a mother, and lover of little children, a few words about
school buildings and school methods may not be out of place.

Americans are proverbially giving to boasting. People of the older world
tell us that this is an expression of our undeveloped youth--a kind of
_Sophomorism_ denoting that we are yet not very far advanced. Be that as
it may, I have observed that there is no more common subject for
boasting than our schools and our school system.

"There are our King's Palaces, where we are training our future
monarchs! Those are the towers of our defence--the bulwarks of our
republic!" I heard a western Congressman exclaim, as the railway train
whizzed past one of those immense school edifices which so closely dot
the area of many of our western States, that one scarcely loses sight of
one ere the high towers and ornate roofs of another come into view. "I
will acknowledge that I am proud--feel like boasting, when I can point a
foreigner to such buildings as those, and tell him they are but our
common free schools, open to every child in the land, rich and poor,
alike."

The friend addressed, an intelligent, shrewd, naturalized Scotchman,
replied that he was "a little old fogy," he supposed, but that those
great high buildings, where six or eight hundred children were gathered
in one school, were like great cities, where too many people were
gathered together. School life, no more than city life, could be
healthy, nor just what life ought to be, under such conditions. To carry
out these great union school plans, made a necessity for too much
machinery. This it was which was grinding out the education of our
children, rather than developing thought, and the result would be
machine education. He said that school was a continual worry at home.
One child was kept after school one day for one thing, and another the