their turn to be an important group for the country at large. The day of these alumnæ, even in the oldest women's colleges, has not been a long one, and graduates of the first classes at Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith are still in evidence. But, in spite of its brevity, the record of the graduate has proved her intelligence, persistence, and public spirit. Of the professional women among the number the great majority have gone into teaching. Sixteen.per cent of all Vassar and Bryn Mawr graduates are teaching this year; 4 twenty-five per cent of Barnard, Radcliffe, Smith, and Wellesley graduates, and from Mount Holyoke fifty per cent. Very many of these teachers, probably the greater number of them, are in public schools, but they make up in large measure the teaching staffs of the private schools in the East, and the headships of the private schools are largely in their holding. The progressive schools especially have attracted them, and in that scouting group they have contributed noteworthy experiments. They have from the beginning also taught in the college as well as the school. Naturally enough the teaching positions carrying the largest responsibilities of scholarship and the highest salaries are in the women's colleges themselves. Unfortunately for women and unfortunately, we make bold to think, for the institutions, but a small fraction of the places on the faculties of coeducational colleges and universities are filled by women; especially in the upper reaches few women are given appointments. And though the women's colleges have recognized that their students should be taught by men as well as women, the colleges for men have not yet ventured on this liberal attitude and there are no women on their faculties.

4 Forty per cent of the holders of the Master of Arts or Doctor of Philosophy degree.

But the women's colleges have done much more than supply each other reciprocally with teachers or positions; they have not lived by taking in each other's washing. Scholars whose foundations were laid in the colleges for women have gone far afield in college teaching and administration. To illustrate from the seven colleges whose graduates are here particularly studied. It is not perhaps surprising that in other colleges, in many cases daughters of the older institutions, a president or dean or faculty member should have received her training at Mount Holyoke or Wellesley. Florida State College, Goucher, Hood, Knox, Lake Erie, Lake Forest, Mills, Milwaukee-Downer, the Pennsylvania College for Women, Russell Sage, Sweet Briar, the Western College for Women, Wheaton, all have president or dean trained in one of the seven colleges so often named. In the women's colleges directly connected with colleges for men, at Brown, at Rutgers, and at Tufts, the three deans have had this same training. The adviser of women in the School of Education at Harvard and in the Graduate School at Yale, at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the deans at Swarthmore, Oberlin, Leland Stanford, Pomona, the Universities of California, Colorado, and Vermont, are alumnæ of the seven women's colleges. Three such alumnæ broke the ice to become the first deans of women at Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Cornell. But they have also gone outside the purely academic administration to which their own education more directly led. They have attacked other educational problems. The Dean of the Woman's Medical School in Philadelphia, of Simmons College, of the Margaret Morrison School of the Carnegie Institute, of the new Curtis Institute of Music, the Director of the Resident School for Women Workers in Industry,

of the Simmons School of Public Health Nursing, have all had the education of the academic college for women as their own foundation. Of the two newest experiments in colleges for women, Scripps in California and Sarah Lawrence in New York, Scripps is calling its new faculty largely from the women trained in women's colleges and Sarah Lawrence College has named a graduate of Vassar as its first president. The much talked-of Bennington experiment includes a curriculum drawn up by a member of the Wellesley faculty, now the head of a college preparatory school.

On all alumnæ lists of professional occupations the doctor follows the teacher, and the women in the great Eastern medical schools are largely recruited from these alumnæ. At the Cornell Medical School in 1926 twentyone out of the thirty-eight women students were graduates of colleges for women, at Johns Hopkins twenty-three out of thirty-three, at the Physicians and Surgeons in New York forty-six out of fifty-four. At the School of Nursing at Yale University, which lays stress on the importance of a college degree, out of twenty-one students with degrees twenty came from women's colleges. In medicine, scientific research, journalism, social work, the arts, such names as Dr. Florence Sabin, Miss Annie J. Cannon, Mrs. Ogden Reid of the Herald Tribune, Miss Julia Lathrop, and Miss Theresa Helburn, Director of the Theatre Guild, represent a large number of college graduates of less fame but great usefulness.

III

The services of the alumnæ to their communities, whether formal or informal, whether through raising a profession or a family, are constant. There is no longer a cleavage between the

married who have gone into the home and the unmarried who have gone into the professions, for the lines of separation no longer coincide. Among the women doing active and useful professional work are many who marry and have children, and an increasing number are still carrying on part- or wholetime jobs outside their own homes. One may say in passing that the proportion of married graduates of the colleges for women steadily if slowly increases. It has passed fifty per cent in almost all of the women's colleges and its trend is still upward. Whether she is married or not, whether she is closely tied to a profession or not, the interest of the college graduate in the community is a keen and a generous one. Many names in such an organization as the League of Women Voters, from its president down, are to be found in the college alumnæ catalogues, and it is so with such boards as the National Board of the Y. W. C. A., the Foreign Policy Association, and so forth. The retiring chairman of the American Council of Education is a graduate and the present dean of Barnard; the chairman of the College Entrance Examination Board is a graduate of the Women's College of Brown and the president of Mount Holyoke College. The present president and a majority of the former presidents of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ and its successor, the American Association of University Women, have been graduates of the women's colleges. Through the country the alumnæ of women's colleges are serving on school boards and boards of health. They are somewhat cautiously making their way into politics and

It is probably about the same among the sisters and cousins of college graduates who have themselves not spent the years between eighteen and twenty-two in college- that is, it is fairly representative of all the daughters of the families on college lists.

serving in legislatures and on state and national committees. They are good and responsible citizens. The only conspicuous group of committees from which not only the alumnæ of the women's colleges but women in general are absent is the boards of the great national foundations.

To those who have been closely concerned with the education of women it is natural that these colleges, which for fifty years have sent out such intelligent and socially minded graduates, should yield in importance to no other institutions or group of institutions. If women, the mothers and teachers of the next generation, are to have as good an education as their brothers, as solid, as intelligent, and as farseeing, then that education must be established so that it cannot slip backward. Further than that, it must be given every chance to advance without rigidity or restriction. The women's colleges must parallel the education offered, not by the mediocre colleges for men, but by the colleges which train men most efficiently, for, unless women are to be less seriously trained than men, the first rank must be the same for each.

It is precisely at this point that we meet the crux of the question confronting the women's colleges to-day. Are we in America prepared to admit the right of women to the same quality of educational opportunity as men? If we are, it follows that the institutions for women should receive financial support in proportion to the tasks laid upon them. Such support has not so far been given.

It would not, of course, be just to compare the endowments of colleges whose work is mainly undergraduate with those of universities which give graduate and professional training and undertake research on a large scale. But a comparison of the women's with the men's undergraduate college shows

a large disproportion in invested funds. The largest of the women's colleges, for example, has endowments yielding annually less than one hundred and twenty dollars per student, compared with five hundred dollars enjoyed by its nearest neighbor among the men's colleges. The difference is made up by charging higher fees and by greater economy of operation. The fees have already been raised to the point where the number of students from the less well-to-do families is showing a serious decline. A substantial part of the income from increased fees has to be used for scholarships to retain our clientele even among the daughters of teachers, ministers, doctors, and other professional men on moderate salaries. It is from these classes that in our experience come the largest proportion of good minds. We need them to maintain the intellectual quality of the colleges, and it would be a great loss to the country if these girls could not be given the educational opportunities of which they make so excellent a use. We need them and their still poorer sisters to maintain the democracy which has always been a valuable element in our academic life. In spite of all our efforts the proportion of students from public high schools is steadily declining; and a relaxing of these efforts would speedily bring us to a situation in which ninety per cent of our students would come from expensive private schools. Such a result would be a calamity for all concerned.

The difference in per capita yield does not tell the whole story. In most of the men's colleges the housing problem is largely solved by fraternities and clubs, and there are no corresponding institutions in the group of women's colleges under discussion. Dormitories have to be built out of contributed funds, and their management increases the cost of administration. The present

cost of building is such that the return from rents makes them a poor investment. The money given for fraternity houses by alumni does not appear in the assets of the men's colleges, but it is in effect an additional endowment.

'Greater economy of operation' may not sound like pure loss, but it is necessary to see what it involves. Among the minor implications are restrictions on library and laboratory equipment, less opportunity for legitimate athletics, poorer apparatus, and less leisure for research on the part of the faculty. But the major implication is a smaller salary budget, involving a lower scale of salaries or fewer teachers or both. For the last ten years salaries in the men's colleges have been steadily rising, and, the supply of able teachers being strictly limited, this means more and more severe competition. The women's colleges have also increased salaries, partly by means of funds raised by alumnæ and a few generous outside friends and foundations, partly by means, as has been said, of higher fees. But the alumnæ are exhausted by their efforts, and the limit of higher fees has been reached for present economic conditions. We must, therefore, expect more and more to have our best men drawn away from us by our wealthier brothers.

What we are most concerned about is the quality of the intellectual life of our institutions. To maintain the present level, and still more to raise it, there must be money enough to retain our good scholars, to give them reasonable working schedules, to afford them time

and resources for research and writing. Positions in the women's colleges must be made positively as well as comparatively attractive, and this to first-rate women as well as to men.

It is easy enough to see how the situation has come about. Most of the money in the country is in the hands of men, and those disposed to give or bequeath large sums to education naturally think first of their own colleges. Even when their fortunes are at the disposal of their widows, the alma mater of a husband or son is much more likely to benefit than a college for women. To thousands of families in which both husband and wife are college-bred, simultaneous appeals have come during these last seven years for contributions to a campaign. In how many cases has the wife's college fared as well as the husband's?

The question which we wish to raise is one of fair play. We have sketched the history and achievements of the colleges for women. They invite scrutiny and they can stand comparison. They are eager to go on, to develop, to experiment. The material which is being sent them in great numbers consists of the daughters of men who hold them as their dearest possessions. For their physical welfare and for their pleasures they lavish their means. For the training of their minds and the development of their personalities the provision they make, in comparison with that made for their brothers, is meagre and grudging. Do Americans believe in educating women or do they not? If they do, the question is one of justice rather than of chivalry.

As it happens, within a span of not many months I have stood beside the graves of three Unknown Soldiers: one buried on the green slope of Arlington at Washington, one who rests beneath the stone flags of Westminster Abbey, and one buried in the middle of the swirling street traffic of the Place de l'Étoile in Paris. Italy also has her milite ignoto, and doubtless others lie in other lands whose troops took part in the Great War. Even making all allowance for the laws of imitation and the herd spirit which govern so much of our life to-day, this widespread honoring of the unknown dead is a phenomenon worth considering.

Man has always delighted to honor the great and those who have performed conspicuous service according to the ideas of their age and place. But now for the first time whole nations, and those the most enlightened, have come to honor the man of whom we know nothing, the Unknown Soldier. As a matter of unfortunate fact, the particular body may be that of one who fought the draft to the last ditch and was a slacker in service. That, however, is of course wholly irrelevant; for it is not really the Unknown Soldier who thus receives the almost religious adoration of his people, but the Common Man, for that is what he is intended to typify the ordinary man who, willingly or unwillingly, served his country and, either because of the lack of a fortuitously happy combination of circumstances, or perhaps because of the lack of inherent ability, failed

to make a known and notable record.

Of course, it may be claimed that what mankind is worshiping at this tomb is in reality 'the soul of the nation' or 'the totality of suffering and struggle and failure and death and victory.' But even if this is true, which I doubt, so far as the generality of the long line of worshipers is concerned, ordinary folk who are not given to rising to abstruse reflections on patriotism, life, and death, - nevertheless the choice of the symbol remains unaltered. Heretofore throughout all history it has been the great leader who has symbolized a cause or a movement or an aspiration. La Patrie in France used to be worshiped in the pure and girlish figure of the Maid of Orleans. For that 'totality' of ideas and emotions and hopes for which Christianity has stood, it was Christ who was worshiped, not some 'Unknown Christian.' No, sublimate the idealism of that tomb as one will, the fact still remains that mankind has taken the unknown man, the common man, to symbolize to-day whatever lofty emotions may be aroused by that silent body; and the more lofty the idealists proclaim them, the more striking is the contrast between them and their symbol. In the century that has elapsed between the placing of the corpse of Napoleon beneath the dome of the Invalides and the burying of the unknown poilu beneath the Triumphal Arch, there has occurred the most mighty revolution in man's thought that he has ever known.

It has come, this honoring of the