THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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This necessity, although deplored by shallow pretenders to culture who deem it antag­onistic, is really one of culture’s strongest allies. The man who can make no response to the challenge of the business world, “ What can you do? ” is, by the modern code, a tramp, a vagrant. The demand that she too shall meet this test, that she too shall answer to the password of th$ practical world, “What can you do?” is, remembering all other boons—I say it deliberately and with no reserve—the greatest boon that mod­ern civilization has conferred upon woman. Today the ability to give a sufficing reply to this challenge is essential to self-respect in man or woman, and that it is so is a triumph of practical education; but the ability to answer this question is also a proof of culture.

In this assembly one could confidently inquire, “What do you expect your edu­cation here to do for you?” Probably every young man and every young woman would be ready with a definite answer. They have formed definite expectations of the education they are engaged in obtaining, and their parents have formed definite expectations of them and of what their education will do for them. It is definitely expected that this education will make of those who pursue it competent civil or mechanical engineers; or good draughtsmen or designers, or efficient farmers, poul­terers, horticulturists or stock raisers, or reliable pharmacists or chemists, or skillful wood carvers or decorators; and looking toward these occupations most, if not all of them, see in the education they are getting here a direct means of self-support. This is admirable. If life itself is noble and dignified, that which alone can support it can not be ignoble and mean; and any institution which stands for the dignity of labor and which brings up successive generations of young people with sound healthy notions of labor is a source of benefactions.

There is a tacit division of society into the professional and practical classes, and a tacit assumption that these classes are reciprocally inimical: the division is mislead­ing, and the assumption arising from it absurd. The professional class includes cler­gymen, lawyers, physicians (broadly embracing surgeons and dentists) and teachers; and latterly authors and artists; the practical class includes the followers of business trades, of mechanical arts, and indeed of all pursuits not specifically included under professional, but following either the etymology of the two words or the simple facts regarding the two classes of workers, do not the practical profess as much as the pro­fessional? and do not the professional practice as much as the practical?

As for the tacit assumption, often boldly proclaimed, that the professional class prey upon the practical, that the professional class consumes what the practical class produces, is not its refutation read in the statement? The two classes serve one another, and to a corresponding extent live on one another. This is inevitable and it is to the common advantage of both.

A second division of society follows the lines of the first, and assumes that the cultured class is identical with the professional and that the uncultured is synonymous with the practical. If absurdity could pass beyond the first division, it may be said to culminate in the second. That a man is a member of one of the so-called profes­sions (in distinction from one of the so-called business avocations) is no ground for the inference that he is a man of culture. The professions, once called the liberal professions, where thus called because no man could hope to enter them who had not enjoyed a liberal education. A particular education was called liberal from the gen­eral belief that certain studies tended to liberalize the mind, and by putting it into possession of the best thoughts of all times and all enlightened countries, freed it from the bondage of the prejudices of its own time and its own land At a time when such a liberal, i. e., such a liberalizing education was the indispensable condition for beginning the preparation of a professional career, it was reasonable to infer culture of a man in any one of the professions; but now when the call to preach may come to the most illiterate, and when the license may be granted to whomsoever claims the call; when the degree of M. D. will be granted to the youth or maiden who will give an indifferent attention to two or three courses of lectures; when anyone may be made