eer as soon as they have mastered the
arithmetic necessary for it may be growing smaller. It is beginning,
moreover, to be an every-day matter for women to receive a college
education. There are already three well-filled colleges of high rank
exclusively their own, and the new Bryn Mawr bids fair to be a powerful
rival to Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley. Many of the colleges for men are
open to them; now, and the capitulation of those strongholds of
conservatism. Cambridge. New Haven, and Baltimore, is only a question of
time. Great colleges are ravenous for fresh endowments, and the offer of
a large sum of money may at any moment procure from them the full
admission of women. It is not impossible that before many years have
passed there will be as many women as men receiving a college education.
How is this army of educated women going to occupy itself?

There is another aspect to the question. Not only is the mass of women
better fitted than ever before for worthy occupation, there has never
been a time nor a country in which their traditionary sphere has shrunk
to so small dimensions. Nowhere else are there so many women of such a
station that they are not obliged to toil and spin, nor to sleep all day
to make up for nights of dissipation. For all those who do not have to
concern themselves with the wherewithal of living, the art of living
easily has been brought to a state of great perfection. The general care
of the house and of the children is still the duty of the woman, but the
labor involved in acquitting herself of that duty is a very different
matter from what it was a generation ago. Then all her energies were
needed to bring up a family well. Brewing and baking and soap- and
candle-making were all carried on in the house, and there were a dozen
children to be kept neatly dressed with the aid of no needle but her
own. Now the purchase of the day's supplies is the only important demand
upon her time; well-trained servants, the descendants of the raw Irish
girl her mother struggled with, are capable of carrying on the cooking
and the scrubbing by themselves. Sewing it is hardly worth her while to
do in the house. Stitching her linen collars was once an important item
in her year's work; now it is safe to say that there is not a single
woman who does not buy her collars ready made. Making cotton cloth into
undergarments has become a manufacture in the unetymological sense of
the word. The Viscount de Campo-Grande,