beginning to realize that their wards cannot attain the desired acme of prosperity without co-operation all along the line, and that, in order to secure this, collegians must be re garded as civilized rational beings, in short as gentlemen, before they can be expected to behave as such. They begin to see that to treat a student in his ordinary life and duties as an overgrown, senseless child, and then expect him on critical occasions to act the part of a fully-astute man, is sheer nonsense. This new code of college management, as its chief feature serves to appeal to the stu- dent’s sense of justice, strives by attractive- ness, fairness and obvious wholesomeness to secure his assistance in maintenance, opens to him avenues of voluntary improvement, offering at the same time every proper and desirable inducement for their acceptance, and in short, strives to make him feel in his every individual fibre that he is an indispens able factor in the welfare and support of his Alma Mater pro esse. Harvard and Cornell have taken a step in the proper direction by making attendance upon chapel exercises optional. Though this plan could not, perhaps, be wisely adopted at some of our smaller institutions, yet it must certainly be conceded that the sooner any college is in a position to follow their illustri ous example the better it will be for that, par ticular college’s prosperity. We venture to assert that the sermons delivered now at Cor nell and Harvard are models of ministerial rhetoric and eloquence. Those delivered at Oxford and Cambridge have long heen recog nized as among the finest and most artistic of all England. THE FREE LANCE. Yes ! in order to bring about this most de- sirable mutual co-operation and assistance between trustees, president, faculty and stu dents, there must be a complete riddance on all sides of compulsory connivance and acceptance of deceptions and injustice. “Sbamsand shod dys ” have no more business in college than anywhere else, and if you force the student to bear with them, you can no more hope for his respect and aid than you can for that of the defrauded customer in your store. Neither can this much coveted state of affairs be made to harmonize with the secret and mysterious sittings of faculty, bordering almost on the Star Chamber Conclaves. What is wanted to secure it is a complete feeling on the part of the students of mutual security, of unity of purpose, of open and fair representation and hearing, in a word of rational treatment. The American student must either have the living example before him or else have the ideal one presented to him in history, which he can understandingly reverence, look up to for in spiration, confide in and imitate. If his col lege authority aid him in neither of these ways he must of necessity slight it and turn aside. Said Garfield “Something in President Hopkins’ letter drew me to Williams.” “The strongest influence I took away from Yale,” said an able graduate, “was the spirit of the president.” This is the animus which should inspire every college official and professor, and incite every college student and graduate. When this is once thoroughly established and recognized, the matter of successful concur rent college government will then be an easily solved secondary question.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers