is true all the good gifts I have named may be secured without the aid
of the college. We all know young men and women who have had no college
training, who are as cultivated, rational, resourceful, and happy as any
people we know, who excel in every one of these particulars the college
graduates about them. I believe they often bitterly regret the lack of a
college education. And we see young men and women going through college
deaf and blind to their great chances there, and afterwards curiously
careless and wasteful of the best things in life. While all this is
true, it is true too that to the open-minded and ambitious boy or girl
of moderate health, ability, self-control, and studiousness, a college
course offers the most attractive, easy, and probable way of securing
happiness and health, good friends and high ideals, permanent interests
of a noble kind, and large capacity for usefulness in the world. It has
been well said that the ability to see great things large and little
things small is the final test of education. The foes of life,
especially of women's lives, are caprice, wearisome incapacity, and
petty judgments. From these oppressive foes we long to escape to the
rule of right reason, where all things are possible, and life becomes a
glory instead of a grind. No college, with the best teachers and
collections in the world, can by its own power impart all this to any
woman. But if one has set her face in that direction, where else can she
find so many hands reached out to help, so many encouraging voices in
the air, so many favoring influences filling the days and nights?
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A