"… Not every girl should go to college. The over-burdened mother of a large family has a right to be aided by her daughter's hands. I would aid the mother and not the daughter.
"I would not put the exceptionally smart girl from a very poor family into college, unless she is a genius; and a genius should wait some years to prove her genius.
"Endow the already established institution with money. Endow the woman who shows genius with time.
"A case at Johns Hopkins University is an excellent one. A young woman goes into the institution who is already a scholar; she shows what she can do, and she takes a scholarship; she is not placed in a happy valley of do nothing,—she is put into a workshop, where she can work.
"… We are all apt to say, 'Could we have had the opportunity in life that our neighbor had,'—and we leave the unfinished sentence to imply that we should have been geniuses.
"No one ever says, 'If I had not had such golden opportunities thrust upon me, I might have developed by a struggle'! But why look back at all? Why turn your eyes to your shadow, when, by looking upward, you see your rainbow in the same direction?
"But our want of opportunity was our opportunity—our privations were our privileges—our needs were stimulants; we are what we are because we had little and wanted much; and it is hard to tell which was the more powerful factor….
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"Small aids to individuals, large aid to masses.
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