Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1877 — Wants Practical Ideas. [ARTICLE]

Wants Practical Ideas.

One of the surest means of guessing at what the coining woman will be, is to observe the subjects the youug girl graduates choose for their commencement essays. So far there is no sign that the woman of the immediate future will be intensely practical; neither does it seem that she.will he so dismally sentimental as some that have gone before her. She promises to he severely philosophical and awfully' cultured] In meditating on that profound and beautiful and expensive thing, a graduating essay, one wondt*rs why it is thfit no ambitious graduate has ever written in that fearful and wonderful composition her ideas on any subject which she is familiar with. Site will write about “the correlation of forces,” the “mystery of the universe,” “American education,” the ‘ lives of great men,” the “relation of capital to labor,” “the planetary system,” the “lost archangel,” the “fine arts,” and evgry abstruse and distant topic under dr above the sun; but she never dreams of giving, the public her ideas on butter-mak-ing, dress-making, house-keeping, or any other topic, which fate may decree' she shall wrestle with in prosaic reality, after she is commended. The male graduate does sometimes, by pure accident, strike an understandable and practical veim He knows more than be ever will again, of course, being a

theorizer of the doubled and twisted and finest twill. He is as great a foe to wit as the female graduate is to practical talk or practical thought. Nobody ever heard a humorous graduating essay. We find no fault with the literature of commencement days; merely calling attention to the abstrusity and poetry of tho graduating essay, which proves that the age of realism, although so near, has not fully dawned.— lndianapolis Herald.