will, of course, honor her instructors and will be considerate of them in every way. But the faculty is not the center of gravity of a college. A student has the right, as an honest and earnest seeker after truth, to weigh herself over against the whole college establishment, considered as an organization fitted to supply the need which led her to enter college. The worthy student puts her all into this college adventure, her money, four years of more than golden time, her chance for fruitful life friendships, her plastic capabilities. So she must know her rights and must expect and demand much.

TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT GRADUATION1

DEAN LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS
Harvard University

Recently President of Radcliffe College

Graduation from school-whether the pupil is "finished," as we say in unconscious irony, or sent to college is a serious matter. It sets people thinking about you, and sets you to thinking about yourselves, or, rather, if you are right-minded, about your part in life. Nothing is more rapid and tremendous than the changes that will come to many of you in the next halfdozen years. How can this school or any school prepare you each and all for the mysterious responsibilities, the suddenly varied and diverse complications into which time is sure to throw you? "Nothing," it was said long ago, "is so certain as the unexpected." How can we get ready for what we know nothing about?

It is idle to speculate long on some things that make a fascinating dream and often a hard, though cherished, reality, but it is idler to drift without a plan, to let the certainty of the unexpected control your present life or leave it uncontrolled. Thus we see the answer to my question. Life is difficult and complex; preparation for life is strangely simple. Truth and devotion, that is all.

1 Reprinted from Girls and Education, by permission of, and by arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company.

Hold fast to these things, and leave the rest to experience. You may be green in many situations; you may and will make blunders; in the sudden turns of life you may not be flexible enough (few are); the measure of your success may depend on the measure of your intelligence; but you cannot utterly fail.

You may say that telling people to have truth and devotion is well enough, but that, like the clergyman's exhortation to follow Christ, it seems vague. Things come to our daily lives as concrete problems; and we succeed if we do succeed through repeated acts which create in us a habit or a general principle. Yet we need the principle to direct the acts. It is like the old question, "Which came first, the hen or the egg?" Not quite so bad, after all. To many women - as to some men devotion is instinctive; to other women it is at first a matter of will; but when they love, it becomes instinctive, as it does, for instance, in nearly all mothers. And every girl has some sense of truth. To give this sense staying-power, to prevent a girl from losing her head where her feelings are concerned, from warping her reason by emotion and saying anything which for the moment seems to help her cause, to give her, in short, a trained sense of truth and a trained hold on it, is one object of such education as you have had. I know a school in which intellectual accuracy is constantly brought to bear on moral life, so that even the arithmetic lesson helps the pupil to be truthful. The simple cases every girl understands. Every girl, for instance, in this school or in any other, knows that if she copies a composition from a book or from another girl's work and hands it in

as her own, she is, for the time being, false to her school and to herself. And if she thinks a minute, she cannot blame people for not trusting her in anything until she has put her life on such a basis as shall make dishonest work impossible. Here is one everyday opportunity to exercise the principles of truth and devotion at school.

You go out of school into the world—all of you in some degree, and some of you in a high degree, to be cultivated women with a power that a few of you are just beginning to know. "Who is it that rules the world?" said Major Henry Lee Higginson. "Doesn't everybody know," he added, "that it is women?" The greater the power, the more dangerous. How shall you use your power wisely and justly?

Let us begin with some of the uses that are unwise and unjust. One of the lowest of these is the deliberate, systematic, and indiscriminate use of personal fascination -the use of power for the pleasure of exercising it and for no good end; the use of power that unsteadies men right and left, and ends in an emptiness which makes you scorn yourselves. Personal charm is one of the great and unexplained gifts of heaven. Some people have it all their lives and never know it, and when they are dead, after their long and anxious and self-distrustful years, we wring our very hearts because we have not told them. Yet had we told them, and had they believed us, they might have lost it forever. Indeed, I doubt whether we could have made them believe us; at the most they would have feared, as Emerson's lover feared about the girl he loved, that our feeling for them had "died in its last expression." Personal charm, self-recognized as

part of one's capital, the power to fascinate men, consciously used to give zest to life, becomes almost despicable; at the very least it tends to make a girl useless and leads her to make men useless by distracting them; at the worst it breaks homes and happiness. I speak of something quite different from that desire to please which is born of courtesy and devotion, and which brings at length an honest charm of its own when the attraction of the professionally charming has lost its power over all who thoroughly know them. I have in mind those vain and foolish girls to whom the homage of men is the glory of womanhood. The professional beauty, though she often lacks personal charm, belongs in the same category, and what she pins her faith to is even more fleeting. Whatever you do, keep your souls white from the effort to fascinate men.

Again, truth and devotion demand nowadays that a woman shall do something. A year or two of social experience or travel may be regarded as part of an education; but there is no excuse for people who make such things an end in life, and no excuse for the mere timekiller, whether man or woman, whether poor or rich. "Mr. Jones," said a youth to a maiden, "is the most wonderful man I ever saw. He knows every card I had at bridge a week ago." "Has it ever occurred to you,' said the girl, "that he is forty-five years old and that he doesn't know anything else?" "Don't you know that girl?" said a gentleman, as he bowed to a strikingly handsome lady. "She wins more at bridge than any other woman in Boston." Even outside of the question of gambling, there is something shocking in that kind of