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Let one remark be made here. It has been asserted that the chief reason why the higher and educated classes have smaller families than the lower and uneducated is, that the former criminally prevent or destroy increase. The pulpit, (29) as well as the medical press, has cried out against this enormity. That a disposition to do this thing exists, and is often carried into effect, is not to be denied, and cannot be too strongly condemned. On the other hand, it should be proclaimed, to the credit and honor of our cultivated women, and as a reproach to the identical education of the sexes, that many of them bear in silence the accusation of self-tampering, who are denied the oft-prayed-for trial, blessing, and responsibility of offspring. As a matter of personal experience, my advice has been much more frequently and earnestly sought by those of our best classes who desired to know how to obtain, than by those who wished to escape, the offices of maternity.

The experiment of the identical co-education of the sexes has been set on foot by some of our Western colleges. It has not yet been tried long enough to show much more than its first fruits, viz., its results while the students are in college; and of these the only obvious ones are increased emulation, and intellectual development and attainments. The defects of the reproductive mechanism, and the friction of its action, are not exhibited there; nor is there time or opportunity in college for the evils which these defects entail to be exhibited. President Magoun of Iowa College tells us, that, in the institution over which he presides, "Forty-two young men and fifty-three young ladies have pursued college courses;" and adds, "Nothing needs to be said as to the control of the two sexes in the college. The young ladies are placed under the supervision of a lady principal and assistant as to deportment, and every thing besides recitations (in which they are under the supervision of the same professors and other teachers with the young men, reciting with them); and one simple rule as to social intercourse governs every thing. The moral and religious influences attending the arrangement have been most happy." (30) From this it is evident that Iowa College is trying the identical co-education of the sexes; and the president reports the happy moral and religious results of the experiment, but leaves us ignorant of its physiological results. It may never have occurred to him, that a class of a hundred young ladies might graduate from Iowa College or Antioch College or Michigan University, whose average health during their college course had appeared to the president and faculty as good as that of their male classmates who had made equal intellectual progress with them, upon whom no scandal had dropped its venom, who might be presented to the public on Commencement Day as specimens of as good health as their uneducated sisters, with roses in their cheeks as natural as those in their hands, the major part of whom might, notwithstanding all this, have physical defects that a physiologist could easily discover, and that would produce, sooner or later, more or less of the sad results we have previously described. A philanthropist and an intelligent observer, who has for a long time taken an active part in promoting the best education of the sexes, and who still holds some sort of official connection with a college occupied with identical co-education, told the writer a few months ago, that he had endeavored to trace the post-college history of the female graduates of the institution he was interested in. His object was to ascertain how their physique behaved under the stress, -- the wear and tear of woman's work in life. The conclusion that resulted from his inquiry he formulated in the statement, that "the co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success, physically a failure." Another gentleman, more closely connected with a similar institution of education than the person just referred to, has arrived at a similar conclusion. Only a few female graduates of colleges have consulted the writer professionally. All sought his advice two, three, or more years after graduation; and, in all, the difficulties under which they labored could be distinctly traced to their college order of life and study, that is, to identical co-education. If physicians who are living in the neighborhood of the present residences of these graduates have been consulted by them in the same proportion with him, the inference is inevitable, that the ratio of invalidism among female college graduates is greater than even among the graduates of our common, high, and normal schools. All such observations as these, however, are only of value, at present, as indications of the drift of identical co-education, not as proofs of its physical fruits, or of their influence on mental force. Two or three generations, at least, of the female college graduates of this sort of co-education must come and go before any sufficient idea can be formed of the harvest it will yield. The physiologist dreads to see the costly experiment tried. The urgent reformer, who cares less for human suffering and human life than for the trial of his theories, will regard the experiment with equanimity if not with complacency.