The cause for congratulation was very real. If things had gone otherwise, it is difficult to see what the future of women's education in England would have been. Oxford was temporarily behind Cambridge in the movement, and a set-back at Cambridge would certainly have damaged prospects in the sister University, and, in fact, throughout England. Women would have been debarred from sharing in the best that University education in England can give, and would have been cut off from the historic sources of sound learning and of moral and intellectual inspiration. A perusal of the Graces will show that though they gave all that was immediately needed, they did not satisfy all the actual or possible desires of the promoters of women's colleges. Outsiders, as before mentioned, already wished for full membership to be granted. To many this seemed a premature project. Yet those were right who foresaw that a desire for more complete membership was certain to come by and by. In 1881 there were few, if any, of the women quasi-graduates able to take an active part in University work. Some apprenticeship, under the wing of Alma Mater, might seem at least desirable. Again, the views held by Girton, that conditions of examinations such as those relating to preliminary qualifications and the Pass degree, ought from the first to have been the same for women as for members of the University, might be urged with some force. As already shown, the objection to compulsory Classics and Mathematics, even up to the standard of the Previous Examination, on the part of some of the founders and supporters of Newnham College was due, not to a preference for easier conditions, but from a fear of a detrimental effect on schools. In point of fact, so many other alternatives than those of the Previous Examination and the Higher Local are now offered that neither of these examinations is much favoured in the best schools that send girls up to the Universities. As to the Pass Degree: the suspicion with which it was regarded by the Newnham pioneers has already been noticed. The objection to it is not that it is bad in itself: many attempts have been made to render a pass course interesting and profitable to men who have not physical strength or intellectual persistency to embark on an honours curriculum, or who wish to reduce their academic duties in order to follow some social or intellectual hobbies. But there has always been the danger of demanding a very small amount of intellectual work and tolerating men who have no leaning towards academic pursuits, and to whom the University is chiefly attractive by reason of its scope for athletics and for genial life in comradeship. There was as yet, and it is to be hoped there will be permanently, no place in the women's colleges for the society woman without intellectual aspirations. Such an element would have been difficult to deal with, and would not have been successful from any point of view.