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.