weak —so that good work cannot be done
without proper facilities for exercise during
the months when it is too cold and disagree
able for outdoor sports. There are also in
college this year, men who, with proper train
ing in their winter work, could make a very
creditable showing at the spring inter-colleg
iate athletic meeting and thus help to raise
our institution to the position which it should
hold among other colleges.
A PROJECT that might prove to be very
interesting to the colleges of Pennsyl
vania would be the organization of an Inter-
State Collegiate Base-ball Association with
schedules to play a required number of games
for the college championship- of the State.
The move would tend to stimulate base-ball
at the various institutions and be the source
of much pleasure. With from four to six
clubs dates could be satisfactorily arranged to
fill up the whole spring term season and so
make college games with us more of a cer
tainty than they have been heretofore.
THE old plan of coercion in our national
system of college government is falling
more and more into the background. The
ancient idea was, if a student cannot under
stand, compel him to accede. The inevitable
and natural consequence of a government
based upon this underlying principle was, that
it soon almost entirely slighted the intelligent
and drifted towards the compulsory. It over
looked the individual rights of liberty, equal
ity and personal perception and assent, and
asserted the more corporate ones of duty, obe
dience and responsibility. It seldom stooped
THE FREE LANCE.
to appeal to the intellect but had frequent re
sort to the corrective sensibilities. It would
hardly brook such a thing as calm reasoning
and philosophical conclusion, but, holding
aloft its tyrannical head, would look down with
supreme contempt, and utter its proud assev
erance “ I order so.”
It was under this regime that college stu
dents fretted and fumed with the intolerance of
their position. The spirit of collegiate progress
was then at its low ebb. Just as the child devel
ops no particular capacity for taking care of it
self as long as it remains under, close parental
tutelag so the college man in those days saw no
reason for widening his sphere of work and influ
ence as regarded the particular institution he
was attending, so long as the authorities over
him, with implicit confidence in their own
ability to govern and judge, continually hamp.
ered his every action, regardless of personal
feeling, with petty rules, niggardly restrictions
and strict limits, the whole clinched and im
pressed with threats of dire and certain pun
ishment for violation. “ God divided man
into men that they might help each other,”
said Seneca, but the reverse of this seemed to
be the plan of the old school of college facul
ties—at least, no matter what its intention,
such was its operation.
The new era of regulation by mutual help
fulness has fortunately seized with a firm grip
our larger institutions, and from them is ex
tending its grasp to the smaller ones. It ap
pears to be the missing link so long sought
for, the very aid so much needed to give the
old wheel of college discipline the impetus to
send it out of the mire in which it has so long
laboriously rolled. The brainy men at the
head of our various institutions of learning are