"The deepest impression made by these preliminary examinations on those who conducted them was this; that the grand desideratum for the higher education of women was _regulation_, authoritative and peremptory. Granting that the college system for young men, coming down from an age of narrow prescription and rigid uniformity, needed expansion, relaxation, a wider variety of studies and freer scope for individual choice, there was evidently no such call in a college for women. In the field of '_female education_,' without endowments, without universities or other institutions of recognized authority, without a history, or even a generally accepted theory, there was really no established _system_ at all; and a system was, of all things, the thing most urgently demanded. That it should be a perfect system was less important than that it should be definite and fixed, based upon intelligent and well-considered principles, and adhered to, irrespective of the taste and fancies and crude speculations of the students or their friends. The young women who, all over the land, were urging so importunate a claim for thorough intellectual culture should first of all be taught what are the unalterable conditions of a thorough culture, alike for women and for men, and should be held to those conditions, just as young men are held, whether they 'like' the discipline or not. The rising interest in the subject of woman's education, which so signally marked the recent progress of public sentiment, required a channel through which it might be directed to positive results. If Vassar College had a mission, was it not, clearly, to contribute something to that consummation?
"To the task, therefore, of reducing to order the heterogeneous medley before them, the Faculty set themselves with all earnestness. Many have wondered why there should have been any delay in doing this--why a collegiate course was not at once marked out and the students forthwith formed into corresponding classes. The reason will appear on a moment's reflection. It is easy to build a college on paper. To produce the real thing requires a variety of material, prepared and shaped for the purpose. There must not only be buildings and apparatus, books and learned professors, but there must be _students_--students who have passed through a preparatory process which requires not only time, but certain moulding influences of a very definite character; and it will not be found easy--at least, it was not found easy eight years ago--to get together four hundred young women, or one-fourth of that number, so prepared.