this
is inadequate for the demands of modern life and modern culture";
we can only echo the words of the wise cat in Mr. Froude's "Cat's
Pilgrimage," "There may be truth in what you say, but your view is
limited."

Goodness, indeed, is not a matter easily opened to discussion. Who
can pigeonhole goodness, or assign it a locality? But culture (if
by the word we mean that common understanding of the world's best
traditions which enables us to meet one another with mental ease)
is not the fair fruit of a college education. It is primarily a matter
of inheritance, of lifelong surroundings, of temperament, of
delicacy of taste, of early and vivid impressions. It is often found
in college, but it is not a collegiate product. The steady and
absorbing work demanded of a student who is seeking a degree,
precludes wide wanderings "in the realms of gold." If, in her four
years of study, she has gained some solid knowledge of one or two
subjects, with a power of approach in other directions, she has done
well, and justified the wisdom of the group system, which makes for
intellectual discipline and real attainments.

In households where there is little education, the college daughter
is reverenced for what she knows,--for her Latin, her mathematics,
her biology. What she does not know, being also unknown to her family,
causes no dismay. In households where the standard of cultivation
is high, the college daughter is made the subject of good-humoured
ridicule, because she lacks the general information of her
sisters,--because she has never heard of Abelard and Heloise, of
Graham of Claverhouse, of "The Beggars' Opera." Nobody expects the
college son to know these things, or is in the least surprised when
he does not; but the college daughter is supposed to be the repository
of universal erudition. Every now and then somebody rushes into print
with indignant illustrations of her ignorance, as though ignorance
were not the one common possession of mankind. Those of us who are
not undergoing examinations are not driven to reveal it,--a
comfortable circumstance, which need not, however, make us
unreasonably proud.

Therefore, when we are told of sophomores who place Shakespeare in
the twelfth, and Dickens in the seventeenth century, who are under
the impression that "Don Quixote" flowed from the fertile pen of Mr.
Marion Crawford, and who are not aware that a gentleman named James
Boswell wrote a most entertaining life of another