s of
their own, with a good supply of common sense.

But perhaps, after all, little can be inferred for the future from the
result of four years of co-education in Michigan University, from the
intellectual and moral standing of the women who are at the present time
students here, or from their physical well-being. We do not assert that
there can be; we do not draw inferences, we present facts. We are fully
aware that the problem of co-education is in the first stages of its
solution; that it will require at least a generation to solve it fully;
that faith is not fruition, nor belief, certainty in this experiment,
any more than in any other; that while the women who are here at the
present time are earnest, conscientious, and high-minded, those who come
after them may be far different; and that even those who go forth in
these first years may break down at the first stroke of future work,
even as some of their brothers have done; but we do assert that, as far
as Michigan University is concerned, educating a girl in a boy's way has
thus far been proven to be better than any girl's way yet discovered,
and there has appeared no reason why the good effects should not
continue.

We are sometimes made to feel, in a manner intended to be humiliating,
that we are trespassing upon ground foreign to our natures, in thus
seeking the higher education in a domain which has hitherto belonged,
almost exclusively, to man--but in all cases this has been done by those
outside of our university; and while we know that they who thus speak
and write are those who consider themselves the best friends to woman in
the spheres to which they would limit her, we also know that all true
friends of progress are friends to the highest culture of man or woman.
We know, too, that for the manner in which we obey the dictates of our
natures, implanted there by 'One who is mightier than we are,' we alone
are accountable.

We know the barriers, real and fancied, which are supposed to stand in
the way; the arduous toil upon which we enter, the responsibilities
which we assume; but for all this, the woman of Michigan University goes
forth brave, earnest, and loyal to the dictates of duty; she expects to
do work in life as a woman whose womanliness has been but intensified
and glorified by these four years of co-education; whose health shall be
all that Nature intended it should be, and who will, in the truest sense
possible, strive

"To make the wo