sex gives tonicity to youth's muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of
which he is rarely conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and
victory more glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of
the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its own. Alas for
the young people who are not different with the other sex from what they are
with their own!—and some are transformed into different beings. Achievement
proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of
future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all,
victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which,
even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and
makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is
sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim
the fair belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome
and refining. As is shown later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker
and is sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a
sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she be, although
in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most influenced thus. In athletics
this motive makes for refinement and good form. The ideal knight, however
fierce and terrible, must not be brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling,
tenderness, magnanimity, and forbearance. Evolutionists tell us that woman has
domesticated and educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by
exercising her royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that
pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating others
distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as much as ever, and in
his dull, slow way man feels that her presence enforces her standards, abhorrent
though it would be to him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays
and games in which both sexes participate have some of the advantages with
some of the disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than
antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best to help, but
his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the latter performs her best in her
true rule of sympathetic spectator rather than as fellow player, and is now an
important factor in the physical education of adolescents.
How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our schools, is
strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the reason why only some seven
per cent of the young men of the country are in the churches, while most
members and workers are women, is that the qualities demanded are the
feminine ones of love, rest, prayer, trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of
atonement—traits not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has