The magnitude of this fact will be apparent if we reflect that here for the first time the girls of a great nation, especially of the poorer classes, have from their earliest infancy to the age of eighteen or nineteen received the same education as the boys, and that the ladder leading, in Huxley’s words, from the gutter to the university may be climbed as easily by a girl as by a boy. Although college education has affected as yet only a very few out of the great number of adult women in the United States, the free opportunities for secondary education have influenced the whole American people for nearly two-thirds of a century. The men of the poorer classes have had, as a rule, mothers as well educated as their fathers, indeed, better educated; to this, more than to any other single cause, I think, may be attributed what by other nations is regarded as the phenomenal industrial progress of the United States. Our commercial rivals could probably take no one step that would so tend to place them on a level with American competition as to open to girls without distinction all their elementary and secondary schools for boys. In 1892, girls formed 55.9 per cent, and in 1898, 56.5 per cent of all pupils in the public and private secondary schools of the United States. Footnote 3: In 1870 women formed 59.0 per cent; in 1880, 57.2 per cent; in 1890, 65.5 per cent; and in 1898, 67.8 per cent (in the North Atlantic Division 80.8 per cent) of all teachers in the public elementary and secondary schools of the United States (U. S. ed. rep. for 1897–98, pp. xiii, lxxv). It has been frequently remarked that the feminine pronouns “she” and “her” are instinctively used in America in common speech with reference to a teacher. Moreover more women than men are teaching in the public and private secondary schools of the United States (in 1898, women formed 53.8 per cent of the total number of secondary teachers, see U. S. ed. rep. for 1897–98, pp. 2053, 2069); whereas in all other countries the secondary teaching of boys is wholly in the hands of men. Footnote 4: In many cases in the west women made their way into the universities through the normal department of the university, being admitted to that first of all. The summer schools of western colleges, chiefly attended by teachers, among whom women were in the majority, served also as an entering wedge. (See Woman’s work in America, Holt & Co., 1891, pp. 71–75.) Footnote 5: Antioch college opened, however, with only 8 students in its college department, all the rest, 142, belonging to its secondary school. Footnote 6: In every case I give the date when full coeducation was introduced; West Virginia, for example, admitted women to limited privileges in 1889. Footnote 7: