y gives. They bring with them some
traditions of scholarship, and some knowledge of the world, with a
corresponding elasticity of judgment. They may or may not be good
students, but their influence makes for serenity and balance. Their
four years' course lacks, however, a definite goal. It is a training
for life, as is the four years' course of their Yale or Harvard
brothers, but with this difference,--the college woman's life is
still open to adjustment.

Often it adjusts itself along time-honoured lines, and with
time-honoured results. In this happy event, some mystic figures are
recalculated in scientific journals, the graduate's babies are added
to the fractional birth-rate accredited to the college woman, her
family and friends consider that, individually, she has settled the
whole vexed question of education and domesticity, and the world,
enamoured always of the traditional type of femininity, goes on its
way rejoicing. If, however, the graduate evinces no inclination for
social and domestic delights, if she longs to do some definite work,
to breathe the breath of man's activities, and to guide herself, as
a man must do, through the intricate mazes of life, it is the part
of justice and of wisdom to let her try. Nothing steadies the restless
soul like work,--real work which has an economic value, and is
measured by the standards of the world. The college woman has been
trained to independence of thought, and to a wide reasonableness of
outlook. She has also received some equipment in the way of
knowledge; not more, perhaps, than could be easily absorbed in the
ordinary routine of life, but enough to give her a fair start in
whatever field of industry she enters. If she develops into
efficiency, if she makes good her hold upon work, she silences her
critics. If she fails, and can, in Stevenson's noble words, "take
honourable defeat to be a form of victory," she has not wasted her
endeavours.

It is strange that the advantages of a college course for
girls--advantages solid and reckonable--should be still so sharply
questioned by men and women of the world. It is stranger still that
its earnest advocates should claim for it in a special manner the
few merits it does not possess. When President David Starr Jordan,
of Leland Stanford University, tells us that "it is hardly necessary
among intelligent men and women to argue that a good woman is a better
one for having received a college education; anything short of