Women are organizing everywhere for the purpose of increasing the facilities of their sisters in the studies of science and philosophy. Large sums are offered to the faculties of universities to gain admission to female students on an equal footing with the male students, for the purpose of studying some of the already overcrowded professions. In the main, all this abnormal rivalry does not contribute a single advantage to either sex. There was a time in the history of civilized nations, and that time is not more than twenty or twenty-five years ago, when an academical education gave an immense advantage to its possessor over his less-informed contemporary, but this is not true in our time, because there is now an overproduction of college-bred men. The man who can decline a Greek noun or conjugate a Latin verb is no longer a rarity, because the sons of European tradesmen and American farmers have deserted the pursuits of their progenitors—which, in the case of the American farmers, is to be deplored—and obtained a collegiate education, that is no longer the inheritance of the privileged few, so that in our time and day an academical education has run to seed among the men. And now the attempt is being made, under the guise of social progress, to burden our girls with the same wisdom that has incapacitated many of our boys from making an honest and independent living. It would be much better for the State if two-thirds of our universities or high schools were changed into manual training schools or polytechnical colleges, where the foundations for the industrial pursuits may be laid, so that labor will be made not only respectable but intelligent. We would then hear of educated mechanics or artisans, and scientific farmers, which, to my mind, requires the same order of intelligence to excel, that it does in the professions generally qualified as “learned.” Why crowd our girls, then, into the professions for which they are not only unsuited by nature, but which are already demoralized by the keen competition within their ranks? It is, certainly, an open secret, in the profession to which I have now devoted the best years of my life, that the methods in vogue to get business have descended to the level of the “confidence trickster,” and that, no matter what ability or merit a person may possess, without the natural instincts and elements of the quack and charlatan he can gain neither a livelihood nor fame. This theatrical demeanor of the profession, this aping the gaudy display of European aristocrats by riding in closed coaches, driven by liveried coachmen, is but the outward symptom of the internal disease of contention for notoriety and success.