to feel otherwise. Let me also say that my condemnation is not
directed against the elementary public schools so much as against that
more select class of co-educational establishments for pupils of less
juvenile years. It would, I think, be interesting to know what
percentage of the girls at present at a given number of such
establishments are the daughters of parents--fathers especially--who
were at those same institutions in their youth. It is a subject
which--so amazed was I, coming with an English-trained mind, at certain
things which were said in incidental conversation--I sought a good many
opportunities of enquiring into; with the result that I know that there
are some parents who, though they had fifty daughters, would never allow
one to go to the institutions at which they themselves spent some years.
And this condemnation covers, to my present memory, five separate
institutions scattered from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.

* * * * *

"If you marry an American girl," says _Life_--I quote from memory,--"you
may be sure that you will not be the first man she has kissed. If you
marry an English one, you may be certain you will not be the last."

Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is,
before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the
latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is
another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of
the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man
or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely
by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that
the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly
opposite views to myself--and what my own may be I trust I may be
excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal
morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual
experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent
opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It
may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of
her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in
America and married in England. If so let us rejoice that so many
charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the
greatest felicity.

There is, of cours