r chance for physical development at school, and they will
be able in after life, with reasonable care of themselves, to answer
the demands that may be made upon them.

The identical education of the sexes has borne the fruit which we have
pointed out. Their identical co-education will intensify the evils of
separate identical education; for it will introduce the element of
emulation, and it will introduce this element in its strongest form.
It is easy to frame a theoretical emulation, in which results only are
compared and tested, that would be healthy and invigorating; but such
theoretical competition of the sexes is not at all the sort of steady,
untiring, day-after-day competition that identical co-education
implies. It is one thing to put up a goal a long way off,--five or six
months or three or four years distant,--and tell boys and girls, each
in their own way, to strive for it, and quite a different thing to
put up the same goal, at the same distance, and oblige each sex to run
their race for it side by side on the same road, in daily competition
with each other, and with equal expenditure of force at all times.
Identical co-education is racing in the latter way. The inevitable
results of it have been shown in some of the cases we have narrated.
The trial of it on a larger scale would only yield a larger number of
similar degenerations, weaknesses, and sacrifices of noble lives. Put
a boy and girl together upon the same course of study, with the same
lofty ideal before them, and hold up to their eyes the daily
incitements of comparative progress, and there will be awakened within
them a stimulus unknown before, and that separate study does not
excite. The unconscious fires that have their seat deep down in the
recesses of the sexual organization will flame up through every
tissue, permeate every vessel, burn every nerve, flash from the eye,
tingle in the brain, and work the whole machine at highest pressure.
There need not be, and generally will not be, any low or sensual
desire in all this elemental action. It is only making youth work over
the tasks of sober study with the wasting force of intense passion. Of
course such strenuous labor will yield brilliant, though temporary,
results. The fire is kept alive by the waste of the system, and soon
burns up its source. The first sex to suffer in this exhilarating and
costly competition must be, as experience shows it is, the one that
has the largest amount of force