these functions. In this matter the small minority of women who have other aims and pant for other careers, cannot be accepted as the spokeswomen of their sex. Experience may be left to teach them, as it will not fail to do, whether they are right or wrong in the ends which they pursue and in the means by which they pursue them: if they are right, they will have deserved well the success which will reward their faith and works; if they are wrong, the error will avenge itself upon them and upon their children, if they should ever have any. In the worst event they will not have been without their use as failures; for they will have furnished experiments to aid us in arriving at correct judgments concerning the capacities of women and their right functions in the universe. Meanwhile, so far as our present lights reach, it would seem that a system of education adapted to women should have regard to the peculiarities of their constitution, to the special functions in life for which they are destined, and to the range and kind of practical activity, mental and bodily, to which they would seem to be foreordained by their sexual organization of body and mind.
Note.—It is fair to say that other reasons for the alleged degeneracy of American women are given. For example, a correspondent writes from America: "The medical mind of the United States is arrayed in a very ill-tempered opposition, on assumed physiological grounds, to the higher education of women in a continuous curriculum, and especially to that coeducation which some colleges in the Western States, Oberlin, Antioch, inaugurated twenty years ago, and which latterly Cornell University has adopted. The experience of Cornell is too recent to prove any thing; but the Quaker college of Swarthmore claims a steady improvement on the health of its girl-graduates, dating from the commencement of their college course; and the Western colleges report successful results, mentally, morally, and physically, from their coeducation experiment. Ignoring these facts, the doctors base their war-cry on the not-to-be-disputed fact that American women are growing into more and more of invalidism with every year. Something of this is perhaps due to climate. I will not say to food; for the American menu, in the cities at least, has improved since Mr. Dickens's early days, and has learned to combine French daintiness, very happily, with the substantial requirements of an English table.
"American men, as a rule, 'break down' between forty and fifty, when an Englishman is but beginning to live his public and useful life. The mad excitement of business you have, as well as we; so it must be the unrest of the climate, and their unphilosophical refusal of open-air pleasures and exercise, which are to blame in the case of the men.
"There are other reasons which go to make up the languid young-ladyhood of the American girl. Her childhood is denied the happy
