THE REACTION FROM COEDUCATION. 19 



institutions are especially exposed to it. The number of girls in any 

 city of 500,000 people who possess means and leisure sufficient to per- 

 mit attendance upon a college is very large. If the college opens its 

 doors directly in the faces of these young women, it can arouse no 

 astonishment that many of them should walk in. Moreover, in the 

 western cities which enjoy a practical monopoly of the coeducational 

 system among city institutions, the brothers of these young women 

 will not regularly come with them, or indeed go to any college. They 

 are many of them drafted into the ranks of business life, and the nat- 

 ural balance of the sexes, which is displayed in the lower grades of the 

 coeducational public school, is here entirely to seek. The families 

 which will chiefly serve as recruiting grounds for these young women 

 will be those in which wealth or comfortable means have been acquired 

 in the present generation. In families where college traditions go 

 back a generation or two, both boys and girls, if they go to college at 

 all, will go to institutions determined as a rule by other than merely 

 geographical considerations. But the stronger the local college, the 

 more will it invade the ranks of this latter class, and it will probably 

 draw upon the girls more largely than upon the boys, because of the 

 indisposition to allow girls to leave home and because of the lesser sig- 

 nificance for them of collegiate family tradition. 



It will be strange if among these city-bred girls of leisure, many 

 of whom will enjoy ample means, there should not be found a goodly 

 number who go to college inspired with the same noble sentiment that 

 now animates a considerable number of young men preparing for col- 

 lege the disposition to have a good time and do the correct thing. 

 Young women of this variety have already found their way into a num- 

 ber of the coeducational institutions, even those located outside the 

 cities, and their coming even in small numbers has been attended by a 

 distinct change in certain features of the college atmosphere. Judged 

 by its external and most palpable fruits, the condition thus produced 

 suggests at times its counterpart as already recognized in men's col- 

 leges undue leisure unwisely spent, injudicious amusements and too 

 many of them. Seen from the inside, it more often means on its 

 positive side, an ingenuous interest in the more distinctly social phases 

 of college life, and on its negative side, a freedom from the more impe- 

 rious and sordid cares of the impecunious. We are assured on high 

 authority that in at least one of the great universities for men, the 

 idle and unprofitable class of rich boys has been awakened to a sense 

 of responsibility and opportunity which is bringing splendid returns 

 to the life of the institution. This is a comforting doctrine, and if 

 confirmed in the progress of time, it furnishes ample ground for a 

 confident optimism in the solution by the women themselves of any 



