Even before the Civil War the commercial interests of the country had become so much extended that trade was rising into a dignity comparable to that of the learned professions. Men were more and more deserting teaching for the business life, and their places, at first chiefly in the lower grades, were being filled by women. During the five years of the war this supersession of men by women teachers advanced rapidly. It has since acquired such impetus that at present more than two thirds of the training of the young of both sexes below the college grade has fallen out of the hands of men. In the mean time, too, though in smaller numbers, women have invaded the other professions and have even entered into trade. These demonstrations of a previously unsuspected capacity have been both the cause and the effect of enlarged opportunities for mental equipment. The last thirty or forty years have seen the opening of that new era in women's education which I have ventured to call the period of accomplishment. From the middle of the century the movement to open the state universities to women, to found colleges for men and women on equal terms, and to establish independent colleges for women spread rapidly. From their first organization the state universities of Utah (1850), Iowa (1856), Washington (1862), Kansas (1866), Minnesota (1868), Nebraska (1871) admitted women. Indiana, founded in 1820, opened its doors to women in 1868, and was followed in 1870 by Michigan, at that time the largest and far the most influential of all the state universities. From that time the movement became general. The example of Michigan was followed until at the present time all the colleges and universities of the West, excepting those under Catholic management, are open to women. The only state university in the East, that of Maine, admitted women in 1872. Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana alone among all the state universities of the country remain closed to women. This sudden opening to women of practically all universities supported by public funds is not more extraordinary than the immense endowments which during the same period have been put into independent colleges for women, or into colleges which admit men and women on equal terms. Of these privately endowed colleges, Cornell, originally founded for men, led the way in 1872 in opening its doors to women. The West and South followed rapidly, the East more slowly. Of the 480 colleges which at the end of the century are reported by the Bureau of Education, 336 admit women; or, excluding the Catholic colleges, 80 per cent of all are open to women. Of the sixty leading colleges in the United States there are only ten in which women are not admitted to some department. These ten are all on the Atlantic seaboard and are all old foundations.