our colleges. Identical co-education can be easily tried with the
existing organization of collegiate instruction. This has been tried,
and is still going on in separate and double-sexed schools of all
sorts, and has failed. Special and appropriate co-education requires
in many ways, not in all, re-arrangement of the organization of
instruction; and this will cost money and a good deal of it. Harvard
College, for example, rich as it is supposed to be, whose banner, to
use Mr. Higginson's illustration, is the red flag that the bulls of
female reform are just now pitching into,--Harvard College could not
undertake the task of special and appropriate co-education, in such a
way as to give the two sexes a fair chance, which means the _best_
chance, and the only chance it ought to give or will ever give,
without an endowment, additional to its present resources, of from one
to two millions of dollars; and it probably would require the larger
rather than the smaller sum. And this I say advisedly. By which I
mean, not with the advice and consent of the president and fellows of
the college, but as an opinion founded on nearly twenty years'
personal acquaintance, as an instructor in one of the departments of
the university, with the organization of instruction in it, and upon
the demands which physiology teaches the special and appropriate
education of girls would make upon it. To make boys half-girls, and
girls half-boys, can never be the legitimate function of any college.
But such a result, the natural child of identical co-education, is
sure to follow the training of a college that has not the pecuniary
means to prevent it. This obstacle is of course a removable one. It
is only necessary for those who wish to get it out of the way to put
their hands in their pockets, and produce a couple of millions. The
offer of such a sum, conditioned upon the liberal education of women,
might influence even a body as soulless as the corporation of Harvard
College is sometimes represented to be.