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....
* * * * *
"Small aids to individuals, large aid to masses.
* * * * *
"The Russian Czar determined to found an observatory, and the first
thing he did was to take a million dollars from the government treasury.
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