ome to spend their summer vacation in bed--"Vassar victims"
all, whose ghosts haunt the clinical records of doctors from Texas to
Canada, from Maine to California, and whose influence makes, so far as
it is felt, against woman's chances for liberal education; for these
failures are counted as natural effects of study, of mental labor which
the female organization cannot endure!

I have no doubt that, for a respectable minority of these
fifteen-year-old girls, life here, with its absolute regularity of
hygienic regimen, is less disadvantageous than the mixture of school and
"society," in which they would be permitted to dissipate their energies
at home; but that does not alter the fact that the vital needs of
immaturity, physical, mental, and moral; cannot be most wholesomely met
amid conditions so artificial as must obtain in a great educational
establishment.

With those who enter more advanced classes at an immature
age--fortunately, they are very few--the case is still worse, for, in
addition to the nervous tax to which I have alluded above, they attempt
woman's work with a child's strength. The result is inevitable--a
stunted, unsatisfactory womanhood, the penalty for the violating of
Nature's law of slow, symmetrical development, is not to be escaped.

Dr. Clarke's _Sex in Education_ puts this point well, and perhaps the
little book may be forgiven its coarseness and bad logic, if it succeeds
in awakening the consciences of parents and teachers with regard to this
phase of the school question, a phase which bears with equal pertinency
upon a fair chance for boys and for girls.

When women begin at eighteen or twenty the earnest business of a
collegiate course, for which they have slowly and thoroughly prepared
while their physical organization was maturing in happy freedom, and
when they give to this higher intellectual labor the strength and
enthusiasm that are at that age of all the life preeminent and most
perfectly balanced, then we shall know what educated woman is, and learn
her possible capacities in all that makes for the noblest humanity.

I do not undervalue what Oberlin, Antioch, Mt. Holyoke, and other
schools have accomplished for woman's higher education. I would not
willingly be ranked second to any in according to them the esteem and
honor which their work richly merits; and among Vassar's own Alumnae are
already many who give gracious promise of what may be hoped for, nay,
fulfilled, when the g