The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1873-05-24
John and Jane ut Harvard.

It is painful to reflect that the President of
Harvard College and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe
mutually entertain such uncomplimentary
opinions of the morals of the respective sexes
during college life. At the Social Science
Convention, held day or two ago at Freeman
place chapel, Boston, President Eliot is repre-
sented to have said in answer to plea that
girls and young women should have every col
legiate advantage that boys and young men
enjoy, that 'it requires special care to prevent
evil in the contact of large numbers of girls.
This lamentable inadvertency stung Mrs. Julia
Ward Howe to the quick, and that lady, with
a pugnacity which was peculiarly felicitous,
coming as it did from the prime mover in the
establishment of universal peace convention,
Immediately replied with an attack on the i'm
moralites Of male college life, and declared
that there were dark things in Harvard College
which were not to be spoken of and which
would be scared away like nightmares and
dreams if women were once there In the
midst of Mrs. Howe's philippe President
Eliot arose and withdrew, possibly with the
intention of repairing directly to the College
and investigating what those dark things were
in whose existence Mrs. Howe apparently pos
sesses such good reason for believing.
Now, in all justice to womanhood, we do
not believe that four hundred young women,
away from home and undergoing course of
collegiate study and discipline, would behave
much worse than four hundred young men
under the same conditions. Nay, we will 60
much further, and add that we think that in
the female college the standard of morality
would be higher and the average intellectual
effort more conscientious and persistent than
in the male. But when we come to ex-
anime the remedy that Mrs. Howe proposes
for the immortality she says at present exists
at Harvard we are somewhat bewildered in the
labyrinth Of speculation into which her theory
introduces us. The course Of study pursued
at Harvard is stringent and severe. The cur
riculum Of the sciences, as they stand at pres
ent, is by no means slender, and we believe
Harvard includes them all But at the age
whom the youth of both sexes are supposed to
apply themselves to study the passions are
uncommonly warm, and we do not know that
the intermingling of the sexes at college would
have tendency to leave the students minds
in that state of calmness and self-poise most
favorable to severe intellectual applca-
ton. Il 10 to be feared that
Chloe and Strephon would suddenly
discover that they were something more than
rivals in . recitation class, and matrimony
might be found to follow matriculation as
naturally in reality as it does in the diction-
airy. Far be it from us to take vulgar view
of SO delicate question. Worse things
might happen to any young man and maiden
than falling in love with each other over the
same Virgil We are merely mentioning our
uneasy, but perhaps, too justifable sus-
picion that the tendency Of the youth of oppo-
site sexes is TO firt early and often, and that
where the sexes are thrown together this ten
dsncy is not to be neutralized by any quantity
of mental philosophy, dead languages or
physical science, you can give them to
digest Julia and Juan would have mutually
melted over quadratic equations and Tom
Jones and Sophia been ready to die for each
other had they exchanged glances for the
first time over chemical analysis You can
| not get John and Jane to look through the