e of being, while remaining isolated,
self-absorbed--by being centripetal, not centrifugal. It cannot be. Now
this is worth saying to you, because you know here at school what a
united social life is. All girls do not know this. You do. There is
distinctly here a school life, a school feeling, a house feeling. No
casual visitor to your playing fields and hall can mistake this. And you
know that this enlarges and draws something out of your nature that
would never have been suspected had it not been for school life. But
when school life ends, what will become of this discovery that you have
made? Boys, when they leave school and have developed the passionate
feeling of love for their old school,--the strong _esprit de corps_, the
conviction that in brotherhood and union is their strength and
happiness,--contrive to find fresh united activities, and transfer to
new bodies their public spirit and power of co-operation. Their college,
their regiment, their football club, their work with young employes,
their parish, their town--something is found into which they can throw
themselves. And again and again I have watched how this has become a
religion, a binding and elevating and educating power in the mind of
young men; and again and again, too, I have noticed how without it men
lose interest, lose growth and greatness; individualism creeps on them,
half their nature is stunted. For the individual life is only half the
life; and even that cannot be the rich and full and glorious thing it
might be, unless it is enlarged on all sides, and rests on a wide social
sympathy and love.

But how is it for girls when they leave school? It is distinctly harder
for you to find lines of united action. Society tends to individualize
young ladies; its ideal for them is elegant inaction and graceful
waiting, to an extent infinitely beyond what it is for young men. You do
not find at your homes ready-made associations to join, or even an
obvious possibility of doing anything for anybody. And so I have
witnessed generous and fine school-girl natures dwarfed, cabined,
confined; cheated of the activities which they had learned to desire to
exercise, becoming individualistic, and therefore commonplace; not
without inward fury and resistance, secret remonstrance, but concealing
it all under the impassive manner which society demands.

Something is wrong: and your generation is finding this out, and finding
out also its cure. Year by year greater