They help the mind in its effort to set itself apart to unworldly pursuits; they are indications of separateness from the prevailing fashions and frivolities.  The girl who puts on the cap and gown devotes herself to the society which is avowedly in pursuit of a larger intellectual sympathy and a wider intellectual life.  The enduring of this habit will have a confirming influence on her purposes, and help to keep her up to them.  It is like the uniform to the soldier or the veil to the nun—­a sign of separation and devotion.  It is difficult in this age to keep any historic consciousness, any proper relations to the past.  In the cap and gown the girl will at least feel that she is in the line of the traditions of pure learning.  And there is also something of order and discipline in the uniforming of a community set apart for an unworldly purpose.  Is it believed that three or four years of the kind of separateness marked by this habit in the life of a girl will rob her of any desirable womanly quality?

The cap and gown are only an emphasis of the purpose to devote a certain period to the higher life, and if they cannot be defended, then we may begin to be skeptical about the seriousness of the intention of a higher education.  If the school is merely a method of passing the time until a certain event in the girl’s life, she had better dress as if that event were the only one worth considering.  But if she wishes to fit herself for the best married life, she may not disdain the help of the cap and gown in devoting herself to the highest culture.  Of course education has its dangers, and the regalia of scholarship may increase them.  While our cap-and-gown divinity is walking in the groves of Academia, apart from the ways of men, her sisters outside may be dancing and dressing into the affections of the marriageable men.  But this is not the worst of it.  The university girl may be educating herself out of sympathy with the ordinary possible husband.  But this will carry its own cure.  The educated girl will be so much more attractive in the long-run, will have so many more resources for making a life companionship agreeable, that she will be more and more in demand.  And the young men, even those not expecting to take up a learned profession, will see the advantage of educating themselves up to the cap-and-gown level.  We know that it is the office of the university to raise the standard of the college, and of the college to raise the standard of the high school.  It will be the inevitable result that these young ladies, setting themselves apart for a period to the intellectual life, will raise the standard of the young men, and of married life generally.  And there is nothing supercilious in the invitation of the cap-and-gown brigade to the young men to come up higher.