The graduates of Cornell now number 1,446. This small army of educated men and women have scattered widely over all the states of the union and to many foreign countries. They have entered many vocations. The profession receiving the largest number is teaching. Of the 1,139 graduates including the class of 1905, reported in the catalog of 1908, ninety-seven have been engaged in teaching in colleges and universities, and 165 in secondary and normal schools. One hundred and forty-nine have entered the law, and 139 have entered the ministry. Business and banking were the employments of 113. Medicine has been the choice of forty-nine, and engineering and architecture of fifty-two. The foreign missionary field has claimed thirty-four, and social service in charity organization societies, deaconess work, social settlements, and the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. have engaged twenty-six. Thirty-two have engaged in farming, and twenty-six in newspaper work. The women graduates of the school very largely have been induced to enter the profession of matrimony. Up to 1876, for example, ninety per cent of the alumnae had married. Of later years the larger opportunities for professional service, opening for women, and no doubt other general causes, have decreased the percentage, but of all women graduates up to the year 1900, seventy per cent have married. Of these forty-two per cent have married graduates of the college. The common error that college education lessens the opportunities of woman for her natural vocation is disproved, at least so far as Cornell college is concerned. The marriages of the graduates of Cornell have been singularly fortunate. Among the more than 1,400 alumni, there has been so far as known but two divorces. Considering the high percentages of divorce in the states of the Union, rising as high in some states as one divorce to every six marriages, the divorceless history of the Cornell alumni witnesses the sociologic value of the Christian co-educational college.

In numbers the graduating classes have steadily increased. The first class, that of 1858, consisted of two members, Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Cavanaugh, of Iowa City. Classes remained small, never exceeding five, until the close of the Civil war when the young men who had entered the service of their country, and who survived the war, returned to school. In 1867 eleven were graduated, and in 1869 the class numbered twenty-two. The last decade the graduating class from the college of liberal arts has averaged sixty.

CORNELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION

President Charles W. Elliot, in one of his educational addresses, after enumerating what the community must do for the college, asks, "And what will the college do for the community? It will make rich returns of learning, of poetry, and of piety, and of that fine sense of civic duty without which republics are impossible." That Cornell has made all these returns in ample measure is shown by the roster of the alumni with its many eminent names in the service of state and church. More than fifteen thousand young men and women have left the college halls carrying with them for the enrichment of the community stores of learning, poetic ideals of life, and vital piety. The fine sense of civic duty which the college breeds finds special illustration in the crisis of the Civil war, and here we may quote the eloquent words of Colonel Harry H. Rood in an address delivered at the Semi-Centennial of the college in 1904:

"The first seven and a half years in the history of this college was a period of struggle and embarrassment. The spring of 1861 seemed to be the beginning of brighter days. A railway had brought it in touch with the outer world, and the effects of the great financial panic of 1857 were passing, enabling the sons and daughters of the pioneers to enter its halls to secure the education they so greatly desired. The sky of hope was quickly overcast, and the storm cloud of the Civil war, which had been gathering for half a century, burst over the land. The students of Cornell were not surprised or alarmed. The winter preceding they had organized a mock congress with every state represented, in which all the issues of the coming conflict were fully discussed and understood.... The first regiment the young state sent out to preserve the Union had in its ranks a company from this county—one-third of the names upon its muster rolls were students from this school. The first full company to go from this township into the three years service had one-third of its membership from this college, and the second full company from the township, in 1862, also had an equal number of Cornell's patriotic sons. In the great crisis of 1864, when President Lincoln asked for men to relieve the veteran regiments and permit them to go to the front, almost a full company were college men. In the class of 1861 only two men were graduated and both entered the service.... The record shows that from 1853 to 1871 fifty-four men were graduated from the college, and of these thirty had worn the blue."

During the war the college had much the aspect of a female seminary to which a few young boys and cripples had been admitted by courtesy. In 1863 but twelve male students were registered in college classes, and at the commencement of this year all upon the program were women except a delicate youth unfit for war and a boy of sixteen years. This commencement was unique in the history of the college. On commencement day the audience of peaceful folk seated in the grove quietly listening to the student orations was suddenly transformed to an infuriated mob, when one girl visitor attempted to snatch from another a copperhead pin she was wearing. So strong was the excitement, that the college buildings were guarded by night for some time afterward for fear that they might be burned in revenge by sympathisers with the south.[L]

Near the close of the war it was seen that many of the soldier students of the college would be unable to complete their education because of the sacrifices they had made in the service of their country. A fund of fourteen thousand dollars was therefore contributed by patriot friends at home and in part by Iowa regiments in the field for the education of disabled soldiers and soldiers' orphans. No gift to the school has ever been more useful than this foundation, which aided in the support of hundreds of the most worthy students of the college.

Two of the students of Cornell were enrolled in the armies of the Confederacy. Of these one became a lieutenant in a Texas regiment. At one time learning that one of his prisoners was a Cornell boy and a member of his own literary society, the Texas lieutenant found Cornell loyalty a stronger motive than official duty. He took his prisoner several miles from camp, gave him a horse and started him for the Union lines.

THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

From the beginning Cornell college has been coëducational. In the earliest years of her history some concessions were made in the courses of study to the supposed weakness of woman's intellect, and "ornamental branches," such as "Grecian painting," which seems to have been a sort of transfer work, "ornamental hair work and wax flowers" were grafted on the curriculum for her special benefit—branches which soon were pruned away.