Flora Stone Mather College - Polychronicon Yearbook (Cleveland, OH)

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If you are faithful to such simple standards you will be doing much for yourselves, your sister alumnae, and your college, and We of '97 shall arise and call you blessed not for the fifteenth volume of Varia His- toria, but for fifteen years of progress towards the consummation of our ideals. With grateful remembrances of college days, and kindest regards to all my classmates and college friends, Believe me, dear Editors, Very sincerely yours, FLORENCE WATERMAN '97 We don't care what you write -such your instructions, dear Edi- tor. Then what if I tell an audience hardly out of go-carts twelve years ago, what college was like in wartime?-those days when breakfast at Guilford must wait till morning head-lines were devoured, days when history lectures that began in ancient Phoenicia ended in modern Cubag days of thrills and arguments and extra editions! There is a memory of open chapel windows-I think Dr. Haydn was leading and of course it was the old chapel in Clark Hall-and of a May wind wafting through them the shrill-voiced Uxtry! Uxtry! of the paper-boy who had penetrated even our peaceful precincts with the news of the Victory of Manila Bay. It was hard for all of us to wait for the last Amen, but We were sorriest for Mr. Bourne. There is a memory of the Present Day Club's great Patriotic Party, to which students and faculty brought their contributions for a college flag. We made the old Clark Hall gymnasium a blaze of buntingg Dr. Fowler, lined off the patriotic songs, and Mr. Bourne led the cheers for Dewey and Hobson and the rest of our heroes. And then we bought a flag so huge it half covered the front of Clark Hallg that day we raised it in the rain, while Isabel Bentley's sweet soprano carried the Star Span- gled Banner to the finish, alone, because somebody had pitched it too high for the rest of us. And there is a memory-the most poignant of all-of the day when we deserted college in a body to join all Cleveland in speeding our Fifth Regiment on its way to the front. Yes, the Spanish war did prove rather a small affair, but remember, we didn't know then just what it was yet to be, nor how many would come home of those gallant young men we watched away with dim eyes. The last half of one's senior year in college is almost bound to be the fullest, the most significant of all. And to the class of 1898 the great glow of national excitement made doubly memorable those last months spent under the shadow of Alma Mater's beloved walls. MARIAN W. WILDMAN '98 'E My Dear College Girls: Some weeks ago a newspaper for which I write sent me to interview the Baron Kukuchi, the President of the University of Tokio and at one time the minister of education in Japan. The Baron has been in this country for the purpose of studying our systems of education with a spe- cial eye to the education of our women. It appears that there is a new woman movement in Japan. The Japanese New Woman is asking for higher education, and the progressive party in the government is strongly in sympathy with her. The Baron Kukuchi was stopping at the house of a wealthy Japa- page lmenfy-eight

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features, the college is more in touch with social conditions of the sur- rounding city, and the city itself offers a breadth of view-point and op- portunities for cultune. Non-resident students are less at a disadvantage as to time for study than one might suppose, since at present the restless American spirit seems to be evolving a college life by no means tranquil and adapted to quiet study and assimilation of knowledge. The loss of our students seems therefore to be on the side of college spirit and sus- ceptibility to college innuences, cultural or otherwise. Our problem of making the college as effective as possible is consequently a hard one, and calls for special effort on the part of students and Alumnae to foster and develop a college spirit and loyalty, which is as necessary to us as to those colleges where it is breathed in the very air. E. F. '94 To the Editors of Vaxria, Historia for 1910: When one of you wrote to me to ask for an alumna letter for the class of 1897, it seemed to me that a busy person could be given no better ex- ample of the hard-hearted and calculating methods by which depart- mental editors find victims to fill their allotted space. Of course she re- membered that the class of '97 published the first volume of Varia His- toria and, of course, she calculated that no one who went through the struggles of editorship in those days could refuse a request to support it now. That she did not choose more wisely among those editors is prob- ably due to the dimming of reputations for literary achievements by the lapse of years, and casts no reiiection on her general method of reason- ing. I crave indulgence, therefore, from my fellow editors in this attempt to comply with her request. Fourteen years is a long time in college history, long enough to make comparative old-timers of us all, but not so long that we have for- gotten the merry days when the class of '97 was trying to start every- thing in the college that had not been already set going by its able and ambitious predecessors-the class of '96, Truly as President Thwing has recently written, they were good days, in the college history, days when college life grew ever richer and fuller and yet not too full for the pursuit of that yet more priceless part of college- college work. Since those pioneer days of Varia Historia, you younger classes have not only carried on our traditions, but have made many of your own, and it occurs to me now to ask what you have been doing with our traditions and with the standards of scholarship which we aimed to set up. Will the fifteenth volume of Varia Historia show fifteen years of progress? If so, I can write with certainty that none will be prouder of such achieve- ment than its first editors. But what is most important to all of us older alumnae who are try- ing to fill more or less important positions all over the country, is not so much what you are doing with the traditions, dear as they are, of our Alma Mater, as what you are doing to maintain and advance her stan- dard of scholarship. It is my hope that you, like the best of my younger college friends in the East, are striving to preserve the qualities of excellence, simplicity, and honesty in your college work, and that you are not going astray, as are many everywhere, after the false and pretentious gods of artincial appreciation and superficial cleverness. And as a representative of days comparatively Arcadian, let me urge you to set your faces away from the swelling tide of complexity so overwhelming in modern college life, and to steer your course back into the safe and quiet harbor of a real and absorbing interest in scholarly work. page twenty-seven

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A nese on Riverside Drive. The Japanese colony has always excited my interest and it was with delight that I found myself actually within the doors of a Japanese home. It must be confessed that the Swedish maid, correctly capped and aproned, who admitted me, was not the ideal of the Oriental servant, nor had her iirst words the Oriental Havor that might have been expected. I tank the Baron is at house, said she. I ta-ak oi' your rubbers-yes? However the room in which I found myself was all that could have been asked of the Japanese aristocracy. There was color-color every- where, in the rugs beneath the feet, in the hangings on the wall, in the embossed leather and inlaid woods. A statue of Buddha sat cross-legged upon the hearth, the jewel in his forehead and the look of contemplative mystery upon his face. As I ascended the staircase a draught of air blown from some upper room brought with it the smell of burning san- dlewood. Within the drawing-room the luxe of Japan, ebony, teak- wood, ivory, cloisonne, lay about in a softly brilliant color scheme. I had only begun to look when the Baron entered. He was a little man with a pointed beard and spectacles and humorous, kindly eyes. His manner was formal, so formal that it was hard to get behind a conventional in- terchange of courteous admiration of one another's land and customs. So what he really thinks of American Women, and the suffrage and munici- pal clubs and all that, I shall never know. He did say he thought we had improved since he was here before in 1893, because our voices are softer, and he is filled with admiration for Columbia's new school of household arts. Then at last We came to Japanese women. The rule of ,the three obediences is the rule for women in Japan- obedience first to the father, then to the husband, then to the son. The heroic heroines of Japanese legend are high-born Women who have had the courage to die by their own hands when it chanced that their deaths might profit their husbands, their Mikado, or their house. This institution of the house or clan is the unit of Japanese society. The head of the house alone can hold office or private property, and if, in rare cases, this head be a woman, she is entitled to the obedience of all her subordinates, even her husband, and, under the new regime, to a vote in the municipal council. But this, said the Baron, as far as I know, has never happened yet. Education, in Japan, is compulsory, and free to boys and girls alike who attend the same school between the ages of six and twelve. After that, the girls take a four or five years' course in their high schools or 'private schools. There are normal schools for the training of teachers, and there is one college for women in Tokio. Women are not barred from any of the professions by law. The recently built factories in Japan give employment to hundreds of women, and there, as in America, they have created a servant problem. But the wages of women are bare- ly half the Wages of men employed in the same positions. Are your women happy? I asked the Baron. The question seemed to surprise him and like a Yankee, he answered with another: Are American women happy? he asked. Happiness lies within the heart. Doubtless our restlessness, our very independence seems to him more dreadful than the dependence and abnegation of the Japanese Woman seems to us. We could only both say, I wonder. That is all I learned from the Baron Kukuchig and here it is and my very best wishes to all of you. Fraternally yours in '99, , HELEN ASHLEY HUNT page lwcnty-nine