us life, for sowing the
seeds of Christian civilization in young ingenuous souls.

And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to
all who see the task they are performing in our new social order. These
girls are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with
other manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a
surplus of males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born
husband is a possible President of these United States. Any one of these
girls may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity
so exalted that she may not be called upon to fill it.

But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education
of our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through
its women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large
establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the
higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps,
reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own
happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the
practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But
this is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so
early, that, if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere
practical duties, our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as
it often does in large places where money is made too rapidly. This is
the meaning, therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to
most of these large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps
unwisely or uncharitably.

We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at
the Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same
class. People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we contrast
extremes in pairs. They approach much nearer, if we take them in groups
of twenty. Take two separate hundreds as they come, without choosing,
and you get the gamut of human character in both so completely that you
can strike many chords in each which shall be in perfect unison with
corresponding ones in the other. If we go a step farther, and compare
the population of two villages of the same race and region, there is
such a regularly graduated distributio