A more real problem, perhaps, is found in the excessive requirements, in the way of comfort and refinement, that young women are said to cherish. In the United States their education, so far as general culture is concerned, outstrips that of men, something like three-fifths of our high school pupils being girls, while even in the higher institutions the study of history, foreign languages and English literature is largely given over to women. A certain sense of superiority coming from this state of things probably causes the rejection of some honest clerks or craftsmen by girls who can hardly look for a better offer; and it has a tendency toward the cultivation of refinement at the expense of children where marriage does occur. It need hardly be said, however, that aggressive idealism on the part of women is in itself no bad thing, and that it does harm only where ill-directed. Hardly anything, for instance, would be more salutary than the general enforcement by women of a higher moral standard upon the men who wish to marry them. And certainly nothing in modern civilization is more widely and subtly beneficent than the enlargement of women in social function. It means that a half of human nature is newly enfranchised, instructed and enabled to become a more conscious and effective factor in life. The ideals of home and the care of children, in spite of pessimists, are changing for the better, and the work of women in independent careers is largely in the direction of much-needed social service—education and philanthropy in the largest sense of the words. Any one familiar with these movements knows that much of the intellectual and most of the emotional force back of them is that of women. One may say that the maternal instinct has been set free and organized on a vast scale, for the activities in which women most excel are those inspired by sympathy with children and with the weak or suffering classes. To the continental European, accustomed to a society in which the functions and conventions of men and women are sharply distinguished and defined by tradition, it seems that Americans break down a natural and salutary differentiation, making women masculine and men feminine by a too indiscriminate association and competition. No doubt there is some ground for distinct standards and education, and in the general crumbling of traditions and sway of a somewhat doctrinaire idea of equality some “achieved distinctions” of value may have been lost sight of. Like other social differentiations, however, this is one that can no longer be determined by authority, but must work itself out in a free play of experiment. As Mr. Ellis says, “The hope of our future civilization lies in the development, in equal freedom, of both the masculine and feminine elements in life.”[159]