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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

not consciously form a part of the bone and sinew and brain of national life; and yet the high school is helping to bring about just this condition, foras things are moving at present, the high school has too many women among its graduates—not too many for the sake of womankind, nor for the sake of the home and the world, but too many as compared with the number of young men among the graduates.

It must originate from some strange misconception among the mothers of the country, that the daughters only are encouraged to look over into the promised land from the eminence furnished by the high school.

This points, it seems to me, to a fact already in existence, namely, that women of ability are already debarred from their own rightful heritage, and so they are uncon­sciously making provision to further forego its privileges and its rights. Let us pre­dict, for the sake of the welfare of posterity, that this phase of woman’s development is only ancillary to this period which is believed to be transitional in all vital respects, and that it is merely a passing phase And, furthermore, it is reasonably safe to eagerly anticipate that the conditions which have been largely due to woman’s activity will be so ordered and controlled that when she does return to the home, it may be enriched by the broadening and deepening and ennobling experience she has enjoyed among strangers in a foreign land. You will say to all this that the university is, on the other hand, sending only men from its halls, and that these are they who keep the intellectual current moving, and who see to it that the world goes on to a higher and better condition.

It is true, and I am sorry it is true, that the university is crowded with men instead of with women. However, there is encouragement in the fact that from one- half to one-third of the students in the state universities are women. The majority of these women are to be teachers, who will, by their influence, principally in the high school, cause a mighty wave of reaction when it is brought to the notice of the large classes of girls that are graduating every year, that the high school is only the “ light from which the dome of the university is brought to view.” The exodus from the high school to the university will, in the future, principally consist of young women. Young men must have preparation for college. As a rule, young men are clever, but they are not clever enough to enter a university without serious preparation. The great majority must get this preparation, if they get it at all, in the high school. They are not now in these schools. The business world embraced in early life may enable them to amass an abundance of wealth in the course of years, but it will not give the necessary preparation for the university; neither will the accumulation of wealth, or the success in business, suffice for a lack of mental grace and development. I have no quarrel to make with the business world, for it is the commercial world that is to carry the gospel of good-will and honest dealing into every community in Christen­dom, and it is the mercantile ship that is preeminent in genuine missionary work. My protest is against the sentiment that young men do not need the advantage that gen­erous education gives to thinking human beings, and that business success is the mantle whose elegance and richness cover a multitude of faults.

The significance of this state of affairs is altogether unsatisfactory. That women must be educated has been settled once for all. History has shown that an abso­lutely unequal education on the two sides of the world is altogether undesirable. I do not, however, wish to intimate that conditions can ever again be such as they were, or even nearly as bad, as when women were floating on a sea of blissful ignorance. For when this movement that is now apparent among women reaches its acme, and woman finds man in the mental degradation that results from unrealized capacity, her remembrance of past waves and winds will make her pitiful for her belated brother, and she will not hinder or retard his efforts to get back into the current of thought and intellectual endeavor.

If my insight into womanhood is correct, the educated woman, the woman of advantages, sets higher ideals for herself than does the uneducated. This ideal of the woman who is in touch with the thought current which pulsates through the realm of