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20 difficulties which may develop in coeducational institutions from these or similar sources. In any event women have in the century just past shown a disposition to lead, rather than to follow, in the furtherance of social reforms. Meantime it is clear that the urban coeducational university is exposed in larger degree than its rural neighbor to the perplexities mentioned.

It becomes increasingly evident as one surveys the situation that the antagonistic views of coeducation which are at present so conspicuous do not rest upon any radical disagreement as to the facts in the case, but depend almost solely upon the educational ideals and the social creeds which are applied in interpreting the facts. Much of the current discussion of the system is rendered futile by the obliviousness of the protagonists to this obvious consideration. If the life and spirit of Oxford or of Yale or of Harvard constitute one's sole standard of educational excellence, then the average coeducational institution will indeed seem a desolate waste. If one's ideal of social salvation for young women involves matrimony as its only god, and the chaperone as his prophet, then the coeducational regime must generally be condemned as a pagan system marking a barbarian stage of culture. Needless to say, such standards exist tacitly or explicitly in the minds of many cultured men and women who sincerely believe coeducation to be a vulgarizing retrograde influence in both social and intellectual life. It is ridiculous to pretend that the coeducational university can meet satisfactorily the demands laid upon it by such standards. This is not tantamount to admitting that the best coeducational institutions can not cope successfully at any point with Oxonian excellencies, much less is it equivalent to denying the possibility of developing refined and noble men and women under coeducational surroundings. But it is an admission of—nay an insistence upon—the fact that the only standards by which coeducation can pretend to be justified and by which it can be justly judged, are those intrinsic to the social and economic conditions which have produced it, and of which it is an integral part.

One may feel toward these conditions contempt, distrust, hatred—what one will—but one must take them into account if he will pass intelligent judgment upon coeducation. One may deplore the fact sincerely, as every lover of established order does, but he can not gainsay that the development of American social and economic life is rapidly carrying increasing numbers of women out of the beaten path of the domestic treadmill with its everlasting insistence upon the incident of sex into fields where social service is gauged by other standards than those of child-bearing, house-keeping and adorning pink teas. Efficiency is certain to be the touchstone by which women are tried