Oberlin was the pioneer in the system of co-education, a system into which she was forced, not so much by fanatical theories as by the cruel hand of poverty. For forty-one years she has held up her banner in the wilderness, and in 1868 I found her with nearly twelve hundred pupils. It was very largely to her men and women that the country owed its safety in the last war. As governors of States, generals of armies, and mothers of families, or teachers of schools, they kept the nation to its duty. From this beginning twenty-five colleges had sprung in 1868. It is nothing to the argument that these colleges may not present as high a standard of classical attainment as Harvard or Yale, if that should turn out to be the fact. For more than thirty years a large number of them have been proving the possibility of co-education, and their graduates are not the unhappy childless women of Massachusetts, but the happy and healthy women of the West, who are strong in proportion as they are busy, and whose "children are plenty as blackberries." Beside these twenty-five colleges, Antioch has been working steadily for twenty-four years, and in addition to the small institutions scattered all through New York and the Middle States, Cornell has lately opened her doors to the same system. All those who have practical experience of its results know how much wiser, sweeter, and more serene is the life that is shaped by its methods. It is a subject on which argument is alike useless and undesirable. We must observe and be guided by the practical result. We are told that public duties are more exacting than private. No woman will be found to believe it. It may be often difficult to estimate the heavy stake that underlies the small duty. "A man must labor till set of sun, But a woman's work is never done;" and while this distich hints at the truth, it is certain that private life will continue to make upon her as heavy demands as the human constitution will bear. For every reason then, a healthy mind in a healthy body is the first thing to be sought. It is to be borne in mind that the first thing Nature sets us to do, is committing to memory--and experience will show that this is the natural first function of the young scholar. Three languages can be better learned under eight years of age, than the simplest lessons in grammar, arithmetic, or history--unless these are confined to rules, tables, or dates, which may be most profitably committed, exactly as "Mother Goose" is. I take pains to allude to this, because I think great harm has been done of late by the axiom that a child should not learn anything but what it understands.