scornful amusement the endeavor of
his sisters and his daughters--or more probably other men's
daughters--to prove that the intellectual heritage must be a common
heritage if Democracy was to be a working theory, missed the beauty
of the picture. He saw the slim beginning of a procession of
young women, whose obstinate, dreaming eyes beheld the visions
hitherto relegated by scriptural prerogative and masculine commentary
to their brothers; inevitably his outraged conservatism missed
the beauty; and the strangeness he called queer. That he should
have missed the democratic significance of the movement is less
to his credit. But he did miss it, fifty years ago and for several
years thereafter, even as he is still missing the democratic
significance of other movements to-day. Processions still pass
him by,--for peace, for universal suffrage, May Day, Labor Day,
and those black days when the nations mobilize for war, they pass
him by,--and the last thing he seems to discover about them is
their democratic significance. But after a long while the meaning
of it all has begun to penetrate. To-day, his daughters go to
college as a matter of course, and he has forgotten that he ever
grudged them the opportunity.

They remind him of it, sometimes, with filial indirection, by
celebrating the benevolence, the intellectual acumen, the idealism
of the few men, exceptional in their day, who saw eye to eye with
Mary Lyon and her kind; the men who welcomed women to Oberlin
and Michigan, who founded Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr,
and so helped to organize the procession. Their reminders are even
beginning to take form as records of achievement; annals very far
from meager, for achievement piles up faster since Democracy set
the gate of opportunity on the crack, and we pack more into a half
century than we used to. And women, more obviously than men,
perhaps, have "speeded up" in response to the democratic stimulus;
their accomplishment along social, political, industrial, and above
all, educational lines, since the first woman's college was founded,
is not inconsiderable.

How much, or how little, would have been accomplished, industrially,
socially, and politically, without that first woman's college,
we shall never know, but the alumnae registers, with their statistics
concerning the occupations of graduates, are suggestive reading.
How little would have been accomplished educationally for women,
it is not so difficu