novelist could make an upright and loyal and able woman do through mental confusion an act in itself so base is significant. Among the people who are intellectually rather than morally untruthful, who would tell the truth if they saw it but who cannot see it, there are, I am afraid, more women than men women whose sense of history is intuitive and whose sense of present fact is more emotional than scientific. Even women who have set out to purify politics have proposed as matters of course such political schemes as no honest man would endure. Now college training does not stifle the emotional in women; but it may train women to see clearly and to speak accurately. The best poet is no less a poet for knowing how to write prose; and the best training of the mind is no clog to the soul.

Girls' colleges were not created to make girls imitate men, even in their minds; they were created to correct the weakness and to strengthen the strength

of women as women. In purity of heart, in self-forgetful service, in spiritual insight, in nearly all that is devoted and deep and high, the women of civilized countries have advanced far beyond the men. If along with this advance there once sprang up in our weaker sisters the notion that timidity is pretty, that invalidism is interesting, and that uselessness is a charm, let us thank the century that has just closed for clearing the air. Let us thank the girls' colleges for their recognition of the claims of a girl's mind, for their strong common sense, for their ideals of womanhood. Now for good and now for evil, the power of women is everywhere in the land. Half the bad things done by men are done under the fascination of those women who draw men down; nearly all the good things are done with the courage that men get from women who believe in them. As to public life, I am still so conservative as to hold that a political competition of both

sexes is less likely to elevate men than to degrade women, and that the peculiar strength of refined and earnest womanhood is exercised in ways less public. I fear the loss of the best that is in woman and, with it, the loss of a power

that is hers and hers alone.

I have spoken too much of what women should not do and have said little of what they can do — of what they must do if they are to fulfil the high possibilities of their lives. If I have rushed in where angels fear to tread, I have done it as one who loves and reverences good women beyond all else on earth. As sisters, as wives, as mothers, as friends, as helpers to all that is noble, you the educated women of this generation have a responsibility and an influence that should make you at once happy and gravehappy because of the limitless power for good that comes of doing day by day what must be done, and of seeing, even in the drudgery of it, "a light that never

was on sea or land;" grave, lest in times of human weakness, you may turn from the light and may see only a sad and dull routine in a world of darkness and sorrow. In these hours, which may be only the reactionary consequence of the best work you have ever done — the nervous depression that follows nervous exaltation - learn to say with the old philosopher, "This too shall pass," and learn to look, even at your own weariness, with the eyes of a poet. For I still believe that, though few women have been great poets, it is part of a woman's mission to put poetry into life.

Going back to the rose and the cabbage, I may say that the college woman's business is not to scorn the cabbage but to invest it with a rose motive, to see the light that kindles the commonplace into everlasting truth. People talk a good deal about loss of dignity; but the one sure way of losing dignity is through constant fear of losing it. I like that

story of President Roosevelt which says that, as he travelled by coach from his sister's country place to the Yale Bicentennial Celebration, he left the carriage and walked a while for exercise; and, as he walked, he saw a farmer vainly trying to get his cows in; and he sprang over the wall, drove the cows to the farmer, and ran back. The story, I fear, is fictitious; but that people should believe it, is to the President's honor. His notion of dignity is his own and might not do for everybody; nor would some other man's dignity make up in him for the loss of that informal and vigorous naturalness which endears him to all who know him and to thousands, to millions, who do not.

The college graduate who, as such, is too fastidious for any honest, helpful work has missed one of the best things that either college or Christianity can teach. Among the many sentences that stand by you in Mr. Kipling's "William the