Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/27

Rh in these new fields, and they will go or stay in proportion as they do better or less well than men. The picture which one learned professor has recently drawn of an uprising of men to force by violence a return of women to their proper sphere, is the product of an inflamed imagination attempting to portray an oriental Utopia. In reality men are chiefly responsible for the changes now going forward, but they are neither the doctrinaires of academic dignity nor yet the leaders of cotillons; they are the seekers after commercial, industrial and professional efficiency. So long as the economic situation remains what it is as regards the principles and motives that control in it, no amount of merely hysterical criticism and opposition is likely seriously to modify the case. And so long, therefore, as many women prefer self-support to marriage on the terms they find the latter offered to them, women will remain primary items in the economic situation, and they cannot be treated in this realm from the merely sexual point of view.

Coeducation is a reflection, often unconscious, of the tendencies which have produced this condition. It represents historically, as well as intrinsically, the democratic disposition to offer equal educational opportunities so far as possible to every human being. The touchstone by which it tests worthiness for such opportunities is social service. So long as women show themselves worthy by this standard to receive the highest forms of education, they will be given opportunity to obtain it, and moreover they will probably, in western institutions at least, obtain it under coeducational auspices. Justly or unjustly the western mind is suspicious of a fallacy lurking in the proclaimed equality of instruction in women's colleges and annexes, with that given in men's colleges. Then, too, if there were no other considerations, the economic waste involved in supporting separate institutions for men and women would tell heavily in favor of coeducation in many western communities. 'Equal but different' is not in educational matters a generally palatable doctrine away from the Atlantic seaboard. If the male is intellectually an altogether superior individual, the female ought on democratic principles to be given a chance for improvement by contact with him.

As a matter of fact coeducation is one of the most characteristic expressions of the social evolution of modern and especially western life. It is not now, and is not likely soon to become, an adequate or satisfactory expression of social and educational ideals in old communities or at all events in the conservative strata of such communities, inheriting as these do directly and easily the traditions of the past, and consequently clinging tenaciously to custom. The few instances in which the system has made its way into New England institutions of collegiate rank are essentially sporadic and serve rather than