. Madame Roland, sitting at her sewing table listening to
the excited debate of the Revolutionists in her salon, mourned that
though the ideas were many, the resulting measures were few. It is the
woman's eternal complaint against discussion--nothing comes of it. In
a country like our own, where reflection usually follows action, the
woman's natural mental attitude is exaggerated. It is one reason why we
have so few houses where there is anything like conversation, why with
us the salon as an institution is out of question. The woman wants
immediately to incorporate her ideas. She is not interested in turning
them over, letting her mind play with them. She has no patience with
other points of view than her own. They are _wrong_--therefore why
consider them? She detests uncertainties--questions which cannot be
settled. Only by man and the rare woman is it accepted that talk is a
good enough end in itself.

The strength of woman's attack on man's life, apart from the essential
soundness of the impulse which drove her to make it, lay then in its
directness and practicality. She began by asking to be educated in
the same way that man educated himself. Preferably she would enter his
classroom, or if that was denied her, she would follow the
"just-as-good" curriculum of the college founded for her. In the last
sixty or seventy years tens of thousands of women have been students
in American universities, colleges, and technical schools, taking
there the same training as men. In the last twenty years the annual
crescendo of numbers has been amazing; over ten thousand at the
beginning of the period, over fifty-two thousand at the end. Over
eight thousand degrees were given to women in 1910, nearly half as
many as were given to men. Fully four fifths of these women students
and graduates have worked side by side with men in schools which
served both equally.

Here, then, is a great mass of experience from which it would seem
that we ought to be able to say precisely how the intellects of the
two sexes act and react under the stimulus of serious study, to decide
definitely whether their attack on problems is the same, whether they
come out the same. Nevertheless, he would be a rash observer who would
pretend to lay down hard-and-fast generalizations. Assert whatever you
will as to the mind of woman at work and some unimpeachable authority
will rise up with experience that contradicts you. But the same may be
said of the mind of