One reason for this, no doubt, is the fact that the women outnumber the men by three to one. Not that the women are poorer teachers. Often, especially in primary work, they are the best. But their average term of professional service is not over four years. They are interrupted by that great accident, matrimony, which invites a woman to stop teaching, and a man to continue. The shortage of male teachers, which exists in so many countries, is felt in extreme form in the United States. Efforts are made to remedy it by the increase of normal schools and teachers' colleges, and by a closer connection between the universities and the public-school system. In the conduct and development of the common schools we see the same voluntary, experimental, pragmatic way of doing things that is so characteristic of the Spirit of America in every department of life. "Education," say the Americans, "is desirable, profitable, and necessary. The best way for us to get it is to work it out for ourselves. It must be practically adapted to the local conditions of each community, and to the personal needs of the individual. The being of the child must be the centre of development. What we want to do is to make good citizens for American purposes. Liberty must be the foundation, unity the superstructure." This, upon the whole, is what the common schools are doing for the United States: Three-fourths of the children of the country (boys and girls studying together from their sixth to their eighteenth year) are in them. They are immensely democratic. They are stronger in awakening the mind than in training it. They do more to stimulate quick perception than to cultivate sound judgment and correct taste. Their principles are always good, their manners sometimes. Universal knowledge is their foible; activity is their temperament; energy and sincerity are their virtues; superficiality is their defect. Candour compels me to add one more touch to this thumb-nail sketch of the American common school. The children of the rich, the socially prominent, the higher classes, if you choose to call them so, are not generally found in the public schools. At least in the East and the South, most of these children are educated in private schools and academies. One cause of this is mere fashion. But there are two other causes which may possibly deserve to be called reasons, good or bad. The first is the fear that coeducation, instead of making the boys refined and the girls hardy, as it is claimed, may effeminate the boys and roughen the girls.