There are two considerations appertaining to this subject, which, although they do not belong to the physiology of the matter, deserve to be mentioned in this connection. One amounts to a practical prohibition, for the present at least, of the experiment of the special and appropriate co-education of the sexes; and the other is an inherent difficulty in the experiment itself. The former can be removed whenever those who heartily believe in the success of the experiment choose to get rid of it; and the latter by patient and intelligent effort.
The present practical prohibition of the experiment is the poverty of our colleges. Identical co-education can be easily tried with the existing organization of collegiate instruction. This has been tried, and is still going on in separate and double-sexed schools of all sorts, and has failed. Special and appropriate co-education requires in many ways, not in all, re-arrangement of the organization of instruction; and this will cost money and a good deal of it. Harvard College, for example, rich as it is supposed to be, whose banner, to use Mr. Higginson's illustration, is the red flag that the bulls of female reform are just now pitching into,--Harvard College could not undertake the task of special and appropriate co-education, in such a way as to give the two sexes a fair chance, which means the _best_ chance, and the only chance it ought to give or will ever give, without an endowment, additional to its present resources, of from one to two millions of dollars; and it probably would require the larger rather than the smaller sum. And this I say advisedly. By which I mean, not with the advice and consent of the president and fellows of the college, but as an opinion founded on nearly twenty years' personal acquaintance, as an instructor in one of the departments of the university, with the organization of instruction in it, and upon the demands which physiology teaches the special and appropriate education of girls would make upon it. To make boys half-girls, and girls half-boys, can never be the legitimate function of any college. But such a result, the natural child of identical co-education, is sure to follow the training of a college that has not the pecuniary means to prevent it. This obstacle is of course a removable one. It is only necessary for those who wish to get it out of the way to put their hands in their pockets, and produce a couple of millions. The offer of such a sum, conditioned upon the liberal education of women, might influence even a body as soulless as the corporation of Harvard College is sometimes represented to be.