chigan, and all the State Universities in the West,
like a number of the best universities in the East, educated young women
on the same terms as young men. Harvard opened its Radcliffe College for
female pupils. At its commencement in 1886, Columbia College, of which
the Barnard College for women became virtually a part, conferred the
degree of Doctor in Philosophy upon a woman. Yale University and the
University of Pennsylvania opened their graduate departments to women on
the same terms as to men. Brown University did the same, besides
providing for the undergraduate instruction of women.

[Illustration: Man holding his hat, leaning from a moving train.]
Catching the Mail Pouch from the Crane.

Another sign of the times, still more striking, was our advance toward
socialism and state socialism. This occurred for the most part in ways
so recondite as to escape observation, yet in many respects the course
of things in this direction was perfectly obvious. The powerful movement
for the legal prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicants was
one instance. The extension and perfection of our public school system,
all at the expense of the taxpayers, was another, it being possible by
1890 in nearly every State for a young person of either sex to secure,
without paying a cent of tuition money, a better education than the
finest universities in the land could give a hundred years previous. The
extent of governmental surveillance over great industries was another
illustration. The Trusts spoken of in a preceding chapter were
unhesitatingly assumed to be subject to legislative investigation and
command. Great corporations and combinations, it was now well
understood, could not pursue their ends merely for profit, irrespective
of public interest. The Inter-State Railway Law of February 4, 1887,
instituting a National Commission, to which all railways crossing state
lines were responsible for obedience to certain rules which the same law
enjoined, was the boldest assertion of state supervision yet made; but
there was a great and growing number of thinkers who believed that mere
state oversight would not suffice, and that at least gigantic businesses
like telegraph, railway, and mining, must sooner or later be bought and
operated out and out by public authority. Nothing had done so much to
promote this conviction as the rise, procedure, and wealth of these
Trusts, for from the oppressive greed of many of them no legi