as other workmen are, by their "chips"?
What sort of a book would a member make out of "Chips from my Workshop"?
Do the young men, to any extent, join in Browning clubs and Shakespeare
clubs and Dante clubs? Do they meet for the study of history, of authors,
of literary periods, for reading, and discussing what they read? Do they
in concert dig in the encyclopaedias, and write papers about the
correlation of forces, and about Savonarola, and about the Three Kings?
In fact, what sort of a hand would the Three Kings suggest to them? In
the large cities the women's clubs, pursuing literature, art, languages,
botany, history, geography, geology, mythology, are innumerable. And
there is hardly a village in the land that has not from one to six clubs
of young girls who meet once a week for some intellectual purpose. What
are the young men of the villages and the cities doing meantime? How are
they preparing to meet socially these young ladies who are cultivating
their minds? Are they adapting themselves to the new conditions? Or are
they counting, as they always have done, on the adaptability of women, on
the facility with which the members of the bright sex can interest
themselves in base-ball and the speed of horses and the chances of the
"street"? Is it comfortable for the young man, when the talk is about the
last notable book, or the philosophy of the popular poet or novelist, to
feel that laughing eyes are sounding his ignorance?

Man is a noble creation, and he has fine and sturdy qualities which
command the admiration of the other sex, but how will it be when that
sex, by reason of superior acquirements, is able to look down on him
intellectually? It used to be said that women are what men wish to have
them, that they endeavored to be the kind of women who would win
masculine admiration. How will it be if women have determined to make
themselves what it pleases them to be, and to cultivate their powers in
the expectation of pleasing men, if they indulge any such expectation, by
their higher qualities only? This is not a fanciful possibility. It is
one that young men will do well to ponder. It is easy to ridicule the
literary and economic and historical societies, and the naive courage
with which young women in them attack the gravest problems, and to say
that they are only a passing fashion, like decorative art and a mode of
dress. But a fashion is not to be underestimated; and when a fashion
continues and spreads like