the two vital forces which animate the life of this little group of girls among the Pennsylvania hills. She has brought into existence one of the most perfectly constituted democracies that exists. It is a democracy such as men and nations might afford the time to pause before and examine. It is nothing more or less than a self-government of 430 young women, the sort of wholesome, level-headed, outdoor young women who make up our best type of college girls. They are no less human than girls of all types the world over; temptation in the form of dinner dances in study hours, and May-day idleness when there are examinations to be prepared for, besets the Bryn Mawr girls just as often as it besets young femininity elsewhere; yet they meet it and come off victorious. They sit in judgment upon one another, keeping order in their own halls, sternly refusing one another permission for undue gaieties, suspending one another, even expelling one another, with never an older head to advise. Where rules issued and punishments meted out by faculties fail, the government of these girls by themselves succeeds. Self-government in colleges, and even in lower schools, is no longer new; but Bryn Mawr College earned the title of pioneer. Before any other had dared this radical form of government, Miss Thomas, then a very young woman and dean of the institution, had urged that this group of girls be given full power to rule themselves. The thing was tried; it is now almost thirty years old. Dr. Joseph Taylor, a Quaker gentleman of the old school, was founder of the college and, in early days, its president. In charge of its classrooms he placed a corps of young bachelors, who were to guide the young and charming students along the briery paths of Greek, biology, and calculus. This was the situation which Miss Thomas, then in her twenties, faced in 1885. Hardly more than a girl herself, her task was to look to the conduct of these other girls. The task did not look easy. Her keen eyes, with a Welsh ancestry behind their keenness, set to work to investigate, and her brain to reflect. Ruling these girls by rigid, boarding-school-missish regulations appeared futile. They were an independent and mentally advanced type, and inclined to rule themselves. Only a mind of big initiative and daring would have risked the thing which Miss Thomas risked twenty-seven years ago. But it was just that sort of mind. Take a glance back over its accomplishments, and the situation looks clearer. were physically and mentally fit for college to be sure, she couldn't find any proof to the contrary, but people said they were unfit. And through all this storm and stress she had held to the underlying belief that she could go to college and learn what men learn, and the event of her life was her meeting with a college a Vassar graduate. woman She drank in this wonderful creature. "She's exactly like other delightful women," was the summing up. Here, then, was a proof. Woman could do it. To the young girl, born in conservative Baltimore, trained in private schools, this meeting was a great dramatic situation. She was beginning to shake herself free. She announced that she would go to Cornell University. This was not what a Baltimore young lady usually did, but Miss Thomas bore off a degree in 1877. Next she spent a year at Johns Hopkins. Next she decided to go to Leipzig for advanced study. Perhaps the going was even less significant than the fact that she did the deciding for herself. In that point lay the real pioneering. After she reached Germany, the first news from home. was that family friends were preserving a sort of hush regarding this unconventional daughter in the presence of her mother, and hardly spoke of her, as if she had brought some sort of disgrace upon the family and was to be mentioned barely A PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE CAMPUS AND above a whisper. Miss Thomas maintained a firm chin and continued her study. She passed from the University of Leipzig to Göttingen and Zurich. She was still in her twenties, and yet she could look back over years of achievement and realize that through them all she had been a self-governed, selfresponsible individual. This surely explains why it occurred to her that other girls had a right to rule themselves just as she had done. If she had been by instinct a conformist herself she would have demanded hide-bound rules for others. But if you should see her to-day you would read in one glance the fact that she never was one. There is too high a brow under her white hair to permit her to accept others' explanations until she has probed them with her own mind. There is a determination in the chin that never succumbed merely because it was told to do so. And there is too much humor twinkling in her dark eyes to miss the joke that lurks in accepted standards. And therefore, when higher education for women under any conditions was so new as to be a bit shocking, what did this mind of initiative and daring do but rise up and recommend self-government in a little Quaker college for girls. For, although the institution was undenominational in name, it was strongly Quaker in atmosphere at that time. In 1886, then, Miss Thomas, exercising her authority as dean, gave informally into the hands of these girls their own conduct. At that period, when the college for women was not far removed from the young ladies' seminary in spirit, we can picture the authorities of other colleges looking on with tremulous alarm while they waited to see this foolhardy young school wreck itself. But the wreck did not occur. A venture is counted foolhardy, or not, according to its outcome. For this reason educators look back upon Bryn Mawr's pioneering in self-government as an event which has made history. From East to West today the college girl is coming to be recognized as a responsible human being who can control her own conduct and who will control it far better if it be left in her own hands, on the principle that the only fun in breaking rules lies in having rules to break. It was Miss M. Carey Thomas who first pointed this out. But although other colleges and schools have followed, Bryn Mawr still stands unique in the completeness of its democracy: for it admits no member of the faculty even in an advisory capacity to its board of discipline. Miss Thomas does not lead liberty on leash. In 1892, when the experiment was about a halfdozen years old, the girls asked that a charter be given to them which should establish a permanent government of their own. The president and trustees gladly gave the girls in letter what they already possessed in spirit; and in their constitution it is to be read that "to the Bryn Mawr Students' Association for Self-Government the president and dean shall entrust the exclusive management of all matters concerning the conduct of students in their college life which do not fall under the jurisdiction of the authorities of the college or of the mistresses of the halls of residence." And upon closer inspection one finds that the matters which are left to the faculty are practically all academic, and that the mistresses of the halls are concerned no more with discipline than are hostesses in a houseful of guests-only with the matters which, without question, belong to the management of the household. As for the behavior of the girls, that is attended to by proctors of their own appointing. Now observe the workings. Take, for example, a young freshman, we will say Miss Minerva Smith. She has been reared in a conservative family, this is her first going-away, she hears that the faculty does not discipline, and a glittering vision of liberty suddenly dazzles her eyes. On the first available day she takes a train for Philadelphia, and devotes herself to shopping. Later on she meets old friends, dines, stays over night and spends Sunday |