ss a nation, a race, an industrial or
economic group, there is one, the importance of which has been all
too little realized. That influence we may call expectance. It is
impossible for anyone to say how far a low standard of industrial
or professional attainment held out before the girl at her most
impressionable age, a standard that to some degree, therefore,
develops within her, as it exists without her, ends in producing the
very inefficiency it begins by assuming. But psychology has shown us
that suggestion or expectance forms one element in the developing of
faculty, and this whether it be manual dexterity, quickness of memory
or exercise of judgment and initiative.

In all probability, too, this element of expectance has indirect as
well as direct effects, and the indirect are not the least fruitful in
results. To illustrate: it is certain that if we start out by
assuming that girls are poor at accounts, that they cannot understand
machinery, that they are so generally inefficient as to be worth less
wages than boys, any such widespread assumption will go a long way
to produce the ignorant and incompetent and inefficient creatures it
presupposes girls to be. But it will do more than this. Such poor
standards alike of performance and of wages will not end with the
unfortunate girls themselves. They will react upon parents, teachers,
and the community which so largely consists of the parents and which
employs the teachers. Those preessentials and antecedents of the
competent worker, training, trainers, and the means and instruments
of training, will not be forthcoming. What is the use of providing
at great expense industrial training for girls, when the same money,
spent upon boys, would produce more efficient workers? What is the
use of giving girls such training, when they are presumably by nature
unfitted to benefit by it?

X

WOMEN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING

The United States started its national existence with an out-of-doors
people. Until comparatively recent years, the cities were small, and
the great bulk of the inhabitants lived from the natural resources of
the country, that is to say, from the raw products of the mines and
the forests, and the crops grown upon the plains by a most primitive
and wasteful system of agriculture. But the days have forever gone
when a living can be snatched, so to speak, from the land in any of
these ways. The easily gotten stores of the mines and forests are
exha