the vast majority are, the caviling of provincial ignorance will not harm them. The reputation of the college is made by its students, women as well as men, and on the women rests a large responsibility for the growth of a healthy college spirit.

The process of “knocking" is opposed to the growth of college spirit. There is no use in complaining for complaint's sake. If you don't like things as they are, turn in and make them better, or go somewhere else. If the habit of faultfinding is deep-seated, learn your college song. Practice at nights upon your college yell. It will do you good. There is a great moral lesson in learning to shout in unison. To "root" in perfect time at the call of the yell-leader is a college education in itself. To keep in touch with men is the best antidote for cynicism.

Snobbishness is opposed to college spirit. It is not a fault of the West, where few students are reared on Mellin's food and finished on champagne. We have few young men who tread on velvet and take a college course by proxy. The Harvard man who keeps a groom for his horse, a groom for himself, and a groom for each of his studies, has few imitators in the West. In the strenuous rugged West, there is little room for the "Laodicean Club," the association of those who are neither hot nor cold, but altogether luke-warm.

But if we lack the perfect aristocrat, we have in the West our own cliques and divisions. The fraternity system at its best is an aid to scholarship, to manners and to character; at its worst, it is a basis for vulgar dissension. The influence of a fraternity depends on the men who are in it. If these are above the average in character and work, it is lucky for the average man to be chosen into it. If they are below the average in this regard, the average man loses by joining his fortunes with it. When fraternities are sources of disorganization, there is something wrong in them or in the institution.

The evil of dissipation exists in college outside of it. The average boy, or rather the boy a little below the average, believes that some degree of manliness inheres in getting drunk. Bismarck is reputed to have said that in the universities of Germany "one-third the students work themselves to death,

one-third drink themselves to death, and the other third govern Europe." Something like this takes place in America though the percentage of those who die of drink is less and the percentage of those who die of hard work is still lower. But too many of our college students have wrecked their lives even before they have realized the strength and the duties of manhood.

The finest piece of mechanism in all the universe is the brain of man. In this complex structure, with its millions of connecting cells, we can form images of the world about us, correct so far as they go. To retain these images, to compare them, to infer relations of cause and effect and to transfer thought into action is man's privilege. In proportion to the exactness of these operations is the soundness, the value of the man. The wise man protects his brain, and the mind, which is its manipulator, from all that would do harm. Vice is our name for self-inflicted injury, and every stimulant or narcotic-every drug that leaves its mark of weakness on the brain, is the beginning of vice. Vice means brain decay. "Death is a thing cleaner than vice," and in the long run it is more profitable. False ideas of manliness, false conceptions of good-fellowship, wreck many a young man of otherwise good intentions. The sinner is the man who cannot say no.

The young man's first duty is toward his after-self. So live that your after-self, the man you ought to be, may be possible and actual. Far away in the twenties, the thirties of our century, he is awaiting his time. His body, his brain, his soul are in your boyish hands to-day. He cannot help himself. Will you hand over to him a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to environment? Will you, college boy of the twentieth century, let him come in his time as a man among men? Or will you throw away his patrimony? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with the vile harvest we call "wild oats"? Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, your joys, building

on them as his own? Or will you wantonly fling it all away, careless that the man you might have been shall never be? In all our colleges we are taught that the athlete must not break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a cigarette gives away the game. The punter who dances loses the goal, the sprinter who takes a convivial glass of beer breaks no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall realize that the game of life is more strenuous than the game of football, more intricate than pitching curves, more difficult than punting. We should keep in trim for it. We must remember the training rules. The rules that win the football game are good also for success in business. Half the strength of young America is wasted in the dissipation of drinking or smoking. If we keep the training rules of life in literal honesty, we shall win a host of prizes that otherwise we should lose. Final success goes to the few, the very few, alas, who throughout life keep mind and soul and body clean.

"Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern," the "comradeship of free souls," this is the meaning of true college spirit. Freedom of the soul means freedom of the mind, freedom of the brain. It is said in the litany that His "service is perfect freedom." Ignorance holds men in bondage; so do selfishness, stupidity and vice. The service of God and of man is found in casting off these things. In freedom we find abundance of life. The scholar should be a man in the full life of the world. "The color of life is red," and the scholar of to-day is no longer a dim-eyed monk with a grammarian's cough. He is a worker in the rush of the century—a lover of nature and an artist in building the lives of men.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND PRACTICE IN WRITING 1. Discuss the meaning and value of college spirit. 2. What part do custom and conformity seem to play in determining what is or what is not a proper display of college spirit? 3. Enlarge on the point that students fix the reputation of a college by criticising certain practices among the students of your own college which tend to be injurious to its good name. 4. Discuss some of the ways of manifest

ing college spirit other than in connection with athletics. 5. Point out some of the things in your institution that might be viewed as hindrances to the development of college spirit. 6. Discuss the advantages or disadvantages of the class rush. 7. Hazing or helpfulness, which is the truer manifestation of college spirit? 8. Discuss courtesy in athletics. Is your institution impeccable in this matter?

HONOR IN STUDENT LIFE IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES1

CHARLES ALPHONSO SMITH

[Charles Alphonso Smith (1864- -) is the Edgar Allan Poe professor of English in the University of Virginia. In 1910-11 he lectured at the University of Berlin as Roosevelt exchange professor of American history and institutions. This selection was presented as a paper before the Department of Higher Education of the National Educational Association at the meeting in July, 1905.]

In the fourth book of his work on "The German Universities" Dr. Friedrich Paulsen analyzes student honor into three constituent elements: courage, independence, and truth-telling. This analysis, however, besides being purely abstract, looks more to the foundation of student honor than to the superstructure. The analysis given by Mr. Le Baron Russell Briggs, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences in Harvard University, is more concrete because it is based on the actual working out of honor ideals in college life. "Want of a fine sense of honor," says he,2 "appears chiefly in athletic contests, in the authorship of written work, in excuses for neglect of study, in the relation of students to the rights of persons who are not students, and in questions of duty to all who are, or who are to be, nearest and dearest." These defects Mr. Briggs considers "a part of that lopsided immaturity which characterizes privileged youth."

1 Reprinted from The Educational Review, Volume 30, page 364 (November, 1905), by permission of the author and of the publishers.

2 See the excellent chapter on "College honor," in School, College, and Character, Houghton Mifflin & Co. [Author's note.]

Without attempting an adequate analysis of student honor, either of its excellences or of its defects, it may be said that the most popular error in regard to the subject is to view it wholly as a phase of ethics. Student honor is only partly a thing of the conscience. One of the most effective appeals that I ever heard made to a band of college hazers was based not so much on the view that hazing is wrong as that it is puerile and common. The students were told that society is coming more and more to regard hazing as belonging with slovenly speech, loud neckties, and even eating with the knife. The appeal was made with tact and sympathy, the students seeming to feel that their honor had been invoked because nothing was said about the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. Student honor, as it exists in our colleges and universities to-day, is only in part, therefore, an ethical dictate; it is rather a curious blend of conscience and convention, of individualism on the one hand and compliance with the canons of good form on the other. Being essentially a communal sentiment, a faculté d'ensemble, it is peculiarly susceptible to the consensus of opinion prevailing in its own college and in the colleges that form its social or athletic environment. A college president writes: "I am almost coming to the conclusion that student honor is based entirely upon campus sentiment, and refuses to receive any other standard. Convince one team that all the other college teams sign certain pledges as a matter of form, and they will consider themselves justified in doing the same."

Another misconception is to regard student honor as instinctive or intuitive, as having the simplicity of the great emotions and but little affinity with the analytic distinctions and reasoned processes of the intellect. Shakespeare's unanswered question of fancy may be asked with equal pertinency of student honor:

"Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head?"

Undoubtedly the impulses of student honor come chiefly from