criterion of capacity. It demands too much of mere memory,
imitativeness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other people's
ideas. Parrots and crows would do admirably in examinations. Indeed,
the colleges are full of them.

But take, on the other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side
of education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty.
Here women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men.
Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are
still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the
witch, with her incantations and her prophecies and the glow of
her bright imagination, and if brutal men of duller brains had not
burned it out of her, she would be incanting still. To my thinking,
we need more witches in the colleges and less physics.

I have seen such young witches myself,--if I may keep the word: I
like it,--in colleges such as Wellesley in Massachusetts and Bryn
Mawr in Pennsylvania, where there isn't a man allowed within the
three mile limit. To my mind, they do infinitely better thus by
themselves. They are freer, less restrained. They discuss things
openly in their classes; they lift up their voices, and they speak,
whereas a girl in such a place as McGill, with men all about her,
sits for four years as silent as a frog full of shot.

But there is a deeper trouble still. The careers of the men and
women who go to college together are necessarily different, and
the preparation is all aimed at the man's career. The men are going
to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and politicians.
And the women are not.