The Political Economist got upon his feet slowly and with a certain diffidence. He was a man who had made his way, self-taught, from poverty and ignorance to a professorship in one of the finest technical schools of America. There was a brusqueness in his manner, and the hard experiences of his life had made him old. He spoke in a quiet, authoritative way. He declared, with a rather heavy attempt at jocoseness, that his hearers had had their sweets first, so to speak, and that they must now go back and take a little solid, unpalpable nourishment; that he had never made a witty or amusing remark in his life, and he did not propose to begin and try then, and finally he hinted that the President had made a very bad selection when she invited him to respond to the toast--“The Modern Education of Woman.” As he warmed to his subject he became more gracious and easy in manner. He spoke at length of the evolution of women’s colleges, their methods, their advantages, their limitations; he touched upon the salient points of difference between a man’s college life and that of a girl; differences of character, of interests, of methods of work. And then he went on: “I believe in it--I believe firmly in the modern education of woman. It is one of the things of most vital interest to me; but my enthusiasm does not blind me. There are phases of it which I do not indorse. I object to many of its results. The most obvious bad result is the exaggerated importance which the very phrase has assumed.” He smiled plaintively around upon the company. “Are we to have nothing but woman’s education--_toujours l’éducation de la femme_? There is such eagerness to get to college, such blind belief in what is to be learned there, such a demand for a college education for women, that we are overwhelmed by it. Every year these doors are closed upon hundreds of disappointed women, who turn elsewhere, or relinquish the much-prized college education. The day is not far distant when it will be a distinct reproach to a woman that she is not college-bred.” He looked down thoughtfully and intently and spoke more slowly. “It is this phase of it which sometimes troubles me. Life is so rich in experience for woman--so much richer and fuller for woman than for [Illustration: THE POLITICAL ECONOMIST] man--that I tremble at this violent reaction from nature to art. To-day woman seems to forget that she must learn to live, not live to learn. At the risk of being branded as ‘behind the times,’ of being considered narrow, bigoted, old-fashioned, I must say that until woman re-discovers that life is everything, that all she can learn here in a hundred times the four years of her college course is but the least part of what life and nature can teach her, until then I shall not be wholly satisfied with the modern education of woman.”