that the women develop self-possession less markedly than in the separate college, where they bear the undivided burden. On the other hand, the make-up of the imitation coeducational world is more natural, more like the real world, than that of the separate college. The real world mixes in men and women pretty systematically and universally throughout its broad extent. So that it often happens that a woman who has attained considerable poise under the abnormal conditions of a separate college finds herself as diffident and uncontrolled and inexpressive as ever when she emerges into the real world. It is not, however, my purpose to balance the benefits of one social system against the benefits of the other. I merely wish to point out the differing results. I have said that within their imitation world the students are supreme. Without this world they become again merely undeveloped men and women, who must prove their right to have power entrusted to them. For the many women who find no immediate responsibility awaiting them this sudden change inevitably breeds discontent. I should almost say that the discontent would be in proportion to the success with which the student had met the opportunities given her through the social activities of her artificial world; though, of course, this is leaving out of account the personal equation. This resulting discontent is one of the stock arguments against a college education. Its validity I readily acknowledge; but its seriousness I question. Not only are we creatures of habit and like what we have been used to for four years, but we- -all of us-like power, and resent the taking away of it. Any period of special privilege carries with it the probability of succeeding disappointment. But the discontent lasts only until some new field of responsibility and interest is found in the real world where the power gained in the imitation world can be exercised. It may be an unpleasant period both for the girl herself and for her family, but it is natural and usually brief. That these new interests in the real world are likely to be better and broader because of this ability to control and to express which has been acquired in the college world seems to me demonstrable, and the only point worth real attention. The nature of these interests, the benefit that they may be to society, I leave to the succeeding speakers. Only let me insist that these interests, taken up after college is through with, are perhaps the most real and most permanent results of student social activities. RELATION OF COLLEGE EXPERIENCE TO PRESENT SOCIAL DEMANDS SOPHIE CHANTAL HART The signal service which college renders to its students is to modify their point of view. Mr. Bliss Carman tells us that Boston is a state of mind rather than a geographical point on the map; and San Francisco, likewise, is a state of mind, of different, but no less delightful, flavor. The best work that the college does is to engender a new state of mind, in which new motives and new ideals are operative. Some, of course, pass through college untouched by the influences there; but to most there is born a regenerative insight which we speak of, in somewhat crude terms perhaps, as the replacing of the more individual and egoistic and personal point of view with the more impersonal or universal point of view. Such a change in mental attitude is likely to be one of the most significant experiences of college in its effects. Let us consider it a moment in detail. Girls, until college years enfolded within the family, in a world in which personal relations are paramount, in which obligations are to immediate loved ones, plunge suddenly into a college community, in which people unrelated by old ties live together. Many readjustments of standard are necessary for this new community-whole is a more complex whole; its interests are defined with a sharper intensity. In the give and take of this life, principles begin to emerge as the basis of human duties and relationships. In the Symposium, Plato has described in wondrous imagery the steps by which we rise in the intellectual life, in intellectual perception, the ever-widening circle of our love. From the conception of love and duty of service to individuals as in the family, perhaps we pass, as Plato says, to the love of many forms, of fair practices, of laws and institutions, from the one to the many, from a parochial point of view to a sense of the whole, kath holon. We judge according to the whole, and love according to the whole. That nature is indeed dull which does not feel in college an expansion of being, in the 54 sense of forming part of a large corporate life, in coming into the heritage of corporate traditions. Pater, in speaking of Marius, characterizes it in his own inimitable way: "Without there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea, widely extended in time and place a system which, like some other great products of the conjoint efforts of human minds through many generations, is rich in the world's experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were, with a single step, a great experience of one's own.* * The mere sense that one belongs to a system-an imperial system or organi- · zation-has, in itself, the expanding power of a great experience. *** It is defined not so much in a change of practice as in a change of sympathy." * It is, indeed, a kind of liberation for the student to have shared the purposes, the impersonal interests of a college or university. This "sense of the whole" of which I have been speaking breeds gradually in college women the capacity to work in a team, to submerge themselves the better after they take their places in the world, in group activities. It is a corrective for the over individualistic attitude which is woman's failing. And this is truly the great need of our day-women who can do good team work, on committees, on boards, on enterprises of all sorts where the collective experience, of several may shape policies to the wisest issue. The world in everyday matters is helped less by the reformer who goes off on her own tack than by the reformer who works shoulder to shoulder with others, banding them together in common ends, in common contribution, in social cohesiveness. College helps most women, undoubtedly, to that point of view, to that vital sense of the whole, in which effective team work becomes possible. It helps women to the plane where they discern the essential things "writ large;" where they see that individual effort comes to its fulness of perfection in cooperative effort—and this is surely the test of a high civiliza tion. College experience renders another service which it is most interesting to watch in the process. Our eastern women's colleges are being invested year by year with hordes of the rich and wellto-do classes who suffer from the blight and sterility of too much comfort, of too much complacency, as Arnold admonishes us, with things as they are. As under-classmen they swing things their own way for a while, with the dash and high spirit that our Ameri can civilization develops; and then they seem to call a halt, recognizing vaguely that there is something else than doing as one likes; and slowly, here and there, they are sucked into this new vortex of college thought, which discloses, as a fair and enticing vista, the conduct of life in accordance with ideals of service-not doing what one likes but seeking to do anything that one can. This is part of the splendid democracy of the college—the sense of brotherhood that begets service. The universities and colleges have ever been the home of ideals; that is their specific contribution to the social economy. For minds that have a capacity for kindling to ideas the college richly unfolds opportunity for social service. It draws to its doors the men and women who are in the world working out the new social conceptions. It is striking to find how the busiest people can make time to speak to college youth of the things that are vital to them; how Judge Lindsay of Denver, for instance, summoned east by President Roosevelt, can give up four hours out of one day in a city to go out to a college to address a crowded hall of girls on the Juvenile Court and probation officers and the help women can give to such endeavor in every municipality. From far and near they come, the people who are doing, the people who are thinking, and creating the new channels for service. The best come, heralded often by a great name already won, so that curiosity and interest alike draw the student in college to acquaintance with the practical endeavor which is transforming our age. Surely never has there been a time when so large a number in the world could say: "Nothing that relates to man is alien to me;" and it is the daily and importunate effort of the college to make that number larger by leaps and bounds. The colleges are, in short, great clearing houses for the new thought, the new activity in social welfare. With such volume and concentration and enthusiasm does the college give harborage to these ideals that few students go forth. untouched by these new forces toward a humaner, a less brutally competitive, mode of living. It might be objected that the college has nothing unique in its claim of furnishing a point of connection with the new sociological work, that many clubs are a similar clearing-house for ideas and activities. This, happily, is true. The college preempts nothing; indeed, the best things of life are not pre-emptable, but, like all gifts of the spirit, are to be won by all who forge their way through to them. It is only that the college, with its larger organization, has some advantages which aid its efficiency in this task. It is its special privilege to effect the fusion of the practical with the philosophic side, to scrutinize the methods and achievements of the actual worker in accordance with underlying principles, to discover the rationale of his efforts and illuminate them with new meaning. Another privilege the college has is that from time immemorial it has assembled the people who love ideas and fertilize them; by the touch of one personality upon another, it passes on the living fire; out of all that the race has accumulated in vision, in achievement, in aspiration, it lights the way for the new generation. The colleges in our land should be, and I believe they are today, reservoirs of intellectual passion, but-what is equally important-reservoirs of moral passion. College experience offers other and very practical agencies which train for later social needs, and which lead to the same goal of a social consciousness. Chief among these I would place student government. It is true that the details of administration make enormous demands on the time and strength of students, that it could be done more economically by paid officials of the college, that there is inevitably much waste; but democracy is, in some aspects, a most wasteful form of government, if we reckon cost by certain standards. Like democracy, student government is chiefly valuable as an educative influence, for its effect on the attitude of citizens, for the qualities of responsibility that it evokes. Nothing else awakens in college so profoundly a civic conscience. It is a wonderful thing to see the idea taking root in a young girl's mind; the confused but insistent awareness that the honor of the college is in her hands, that thoughtless conduct in public places will not merely discredit her as an individual but discredit her college; and in the more immediate life, the right to have hilarious fudge parties late at night, to disturb a neighbor's study or sleep by loud talking all these simple lessons come home as related to a larger principle. They are not, of course, new ideas; but the reasons for forbearance and allegiance toward a community ideal are directed toward a larger and more impersonal whole. It amazes me continually to see the anxious care with which punishment is meted out by Student Government, the strong pressure of public opinion against those who do not offend openly and yet would violate the spirit of the covenant, the watchful effort to rouse those who are living according to a too individualistic standard. At |