contemptuous of "book-learning" was bridged by a new order of men with a grasp of both theory and practice. When the experiment stations demonstrated as for instance by the milk testing and bacteriology of the dairy, by the breeding of new varieties of crops and animals, by the destruction of insect pests, and by the elimination of tuberculosis that the endowment of scientific research paid the community in concrete coin, they had no further trouble about getting funds. Through agricultural institutions, university extension lectures, short winter courses, demonstration trains, lending libraries, correspondence courses, and franked bulletins, the land-grant colleges now reach two or three million people a year. They have come to realize that they have a wider function than training a few expert managers of big farms; they have to educate a community for country life. The influence exerted by the Morrill Act is well set forth in the words of Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell, one of the first to perceive its spiritual significance and one of the largest contributors to its realization: The Land-Grant Act is probably the most important single specific enactment ever made in the interest of education. It recognizes the principle that every citizen is entitled to receive educational aid from the government and that the common affairs of life are proper subjects with which to educate or train men. Its provisions are so broad that the educational development of all future time may rest upon it. It expresses the final emancipation from formal, traditional and aristocratic ideas and it imposes no methods or limitations. It recognizes the democracy of education and then leaves all the means to be worked out as time goes on. This beneficent legislation, passed by Congress in the darkest hour of the republic, carried into effect and combined in a practical way Washington's idea of national aid and control, Jefferson's physiocratic theory of the fundamental importance of agriculture, Franklin's plans for vocational training, and Lincoln's plea for the education of labor. The Rise of the State Colleges of Agriculture in Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, vol. iv. CHAPTER XVI WOMEN KNOCKING AT THE COLLEGE DOOR Educate the women and the men will be educated. - Mary Lyon. FOR more than two hundred years after the first colleges were established in America their doors were barred against women. Even the rudiments of education were grudgingly granted in colonial days; and, if any women were bold enough to claim the privilege of learning the things that men were encouraged to know, it was at the peril of social disapprobation. In the dame schools the little girls were taught to learn the letters from hornbooks as well as from their samplers, and penmanship was more highly esteemed as a fine art than it is in these days of typewriters and dictaphones. We must remember, however, that in the manifold industries of the household - cooking, preserving, brewing, dairying, soap-making, gardening, spinning, dyeing, weaving, millinery, and dressmaking - the girls of the colonial period had advantages for "laboratory practice" in the fundamental industries such as our million-dollar technological institutes do not afford. It was found desirable in the interests of domestic economy that they should also be taught elementary arithmetic. In the Massachusetts Ordinance of 1642, the corner-stone of the public school system of the United States, we see the authorities grappling with the problem of coeducation, for they held "that boys and girls be not suffered to converse together, so as may occasion any wanton, dishonest or immodest behaviour." But for the first century and a half after the settlement of the country doors of the grammar schools were kept pretty tightly closed to the weaker sex. The Hopkins School of New Haven ruled in 1684 that "all girls be excluded as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as ye law injoines and as is the Designe of this settlement." In the early part of the eighteenth century three-fourths of the women who were called upon to sign legal documents had to make their mark. After the Revolution, however, a different spirit began to prevail, and the girls were allowed to receive instruction after school. Gloucester in 1790 passed an eight-hour law for its schoolmaster in order that he might give two hours a day "to the instruction of females as they are a tender and interesting branch of the community but have been much neglected in the public schools of this town." The selectmen of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, opened in 1773 a school where girls were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. David McClure, the Portsmouth schoolmaster, writes in his diary that he had seventy or eighty misses from seven to twenty years of age, so that he was obliged to take half of them in the forenoon and half in the afternoon, and he adds: "This is, I believe, the only female school (supported by the town) in New England and is a wise and useful institution." We find Franklin as a boy arguing with his chum in favor of the "propriety of educating the female sex in learning and their abilities for study" and later in life recommending "the knowledge of accounts . . . for our young females, as likely to be of more use to their children, in case of widowhood, than either music or dancing, by preserving them from losses by imposition of crafty men and enabling them to continue perhaps a profitable mercantile house." But even the far-sighted Franklin could not have foreseen the modern business |