acting and conservative elements. In normal society, class modifies class; the two sexes place each other reciprocally on their good behavior; and different ages and occupations, and modes of thought and habits of life, and interests and plans, impinge upon each other and constitute potent factors in working out the problem of individual and public character and conduct. But in crowded dormitory buildings the idiosyncrasies of student character would find nothing to counteract them, but everything to stimulate and invigorate them; and the vicious and disorderly would find the materials to operate on within their reach, and prepared for their manipulations by the very genius of the aggregation.

2. Again, the system tends to stimulate disorder because it is avowedly repressive. It virtually announces to the students that the authorities have, and can have, no confidence in them; and that it is their intention to govern them by vigilance and espionage and the arts of the detective chiefly, if not alone. The issue tendered is, of course, accepted by the students, and the normal state between teachers and pupils is that of antagonism. The students on their part cordially reciprocate the implied expression of confidence withheld. No social relations exist between them and the Faculty. Indeed, for one of their number to cultivate terms of intimacy with any member of the Faculty is to lose caste with his fellows, and to be treated by them as one who has treasonably gone over to the enemy. With war virtually declared, and lines of battle virtually drawn-with a score of men, more or less, on one side pledged to enforce order, and hundreds on the other tempted to resist and thwart such irritating and unnecessary use of force, the natural result ought not to be doubtful. Vigilance will be met by vigilance; and hundreds of young men can, to say the least, be just as vigilant, adroit, and untiring as a score of old Blows inflicted by one side will be certain to provoke and secure the return of characteristic blows by the other. A successful raid now by the governing power will be resented by the comrades of the victims; and there will be perpetrated, at unexpected times and in unexpected places, annoyances, public and private, that college-boy genius, stimulated by the quasi state of war, is competent to invent and execute. "College smiles," tin-pan serenades, and pistol fusilades make night hideous; while gates and fences and vehicles and merchants' signs mark the ravages of war. On the other hand, an unsuccessful raid to make a reconnoisance, to abate a nuisance, or to capture a prisoner, provokes merriment; and fun, reinforcing resentment, intensifies the difficulty and multiplies the disorder. Temptations will be plied to induce the

men.

officer to make the abortive effort over again; and numberless baits will be thrown out and ingenious expedients offered to en. tice to impracticable enterprises. If the officer makes no effort at all, he will be an object of contempt; if he makes what must inevitably be abortive attempts, he becomes the butt of ridicule.

3. The objections to the system already mentioned are greatly enhanced by the fact that those who administer it at the most difficult and dangerous times are young and usually inexperienced men-earnest, perhaps, but indiscreet, who provoke more disorder than they prevent or suppress.

In a system so favorable to chronic disorder, moral character must be jeopardized, and studiousness, in a degree, sacrificed.

In this connection, however, let me make an admission and assert a principle as well: The ordinary noises in a large dormitory filled with students furnish a condition of things favorable to efficient mental development, and practical attainment in knowlledge. This is a noisy world; and the educated man who is not trained to control his attention, and pursue lines of thought in the midst of confusion and tumult, to say the least, is not fit to be a leader of men. Orderly noises, then, in a college dormitory-such as the slamming of doors, the moving of chairs, the falling of books, the sound of footfalls, and the subdued hum of voicesare not unmixed evils, but may subserve a valuable purpose towards culture and training in habits of self-control. Consequently there is some compensation for advantages lost if the students occupy the college buildings voluntarily, not as dormitories controlled by surveillance, but as students' homes governed by the power of influence exerted not only by the faculty, but by refined and vir. tuous families placed in authority there. Some of the older colleges utilize their buildings in this secure way, and by voluntary processes the maintenance of good board at economical rates.

But chronic conflicts and disorderly noises compromise directly or indirectly every occupant of the dormitories under surveillance; and furnish a state of things not at all favorable to studiousness and mental progress. Those engaged in the disorders for the time being neglect their books; and those not actively compromised have their curiosity excited so that they watch the progress of the riot or the fun, and wait the issue of the disorder.

While correct deportment among the students, their morals and proper habits of study will not be promoted by the Dormitory system, their manners would suffer seriously. Deterioration in manners always follows upon the herding of either sex by itself, away from the refining influences of home and the correcting influences of the other sex.

But we have not in this country the means and appliances for an efficient enforcement of the Dormitory plan. The system here -where it was not adopted from necessity, because localities did not furnish lodging facilities for students-was copied from the monastic institutions of Europe. There the buildings are so constructed as to make it possible for the authorities to carry on espionage and surveillance with some efficiency. The groups of buildings pertaining to each college is surrounded by a high wall not easily scaled. At a certain hour of the night, according to the regulations, the great gate of this wall is locked. After that time, the officer can go his rounds and have some hope that all he finds in the rooms are prisoners for the night; and he can have the grim consolation of knowing that all disorders perpetrated afterwards will perhaps be monopolized by the college community, and not advertised abroad. But here the machinery is not provided by which to enforce the system. When, as he goes the rounds at night, the officer's back is turned upon the doors of the students' rooms, all the occupants are virtually at liberty, if so disposed, to go where forbidden pleasure or mischief leads them.

Since writing the above I have had the privilege to read Dr. Wayland's book "On the Present College System"; and some articles in the "American Journal of Education" "On Improvements Practicable in American Colleges," by Dr. F. A. P. Barnard, the present distinguished president of Columbia College, New York city. Dr. Wayland treats formally and at length of the Dormitory system. Dr. Barnard refers to it incidentally, but in torms of no uncertain meaning. I am happy to find that my views above are sustained by the authority and the arguments of these educators of world-wide reputation.

Says Dr. Barnard:

"In connection with the subject of government, it is in order to allude to a radical evil of our system, out of which a multitude of consequent evils grow. I can conceive nothing more injudicious in principle than the collecting together in an isolated community, apart from the observation of the public, and but nominally subject to the supervision of those who are presumed to watch over them, of a large body of young men fresh from the restraints of the family and the school, and surrounded by a multitude of novel temptations. The Dormitory system, as it is called, I esteem for such a class of persons to be purely and unqualifiedly bad. It is pernicious equally to the morals and the manners. It fosters vicious habits, blunts the sense of delicacy, encourages rudeness and vulgarity of speech, leads to disregard of personal neatness, and is finally the obvious and immediate cause of nearly every one of those offences which the penal laws of colleges are enacted to punish."*

Dr. Wayland discusses the subject at length, giving the argu. ments on both sides. He objects to the Dormitory system because *Barnard's American Journal of Education, Vol. 1, p. 281.

It is unnatural," maintaining that "the family, with all the sympathies of relationship and society is the natural place for the young"; because it is incongruous, since it is applied indiscriminately to "the younger students," and "to those that are farther advanced in age"; and because the system is not conducive to health. In a discussion of "the moral bearings of the question" are found the paragraphs quoted below:

If we really intend to carry out a system of exact moral responsibility, it is manifest that our arrangements stand in need of a radical change. In order to put this subject in a true light, suppose that a building similar to one of our colleges, and provided with the same means of moral restraint, were erected in one of our cities for the purpose of boarding and lodging young men of from fifteen to twenty-five or thirty years of age. Would any parent consider his son better situated in such an establishment than in such a boarding house as he might select for him? I cannot, for myself, see that such an establishment would possess any peculiar advantages. No one that I have ever heard of has yet made the experiment.

But, aside from all this, there are particular disadvantages arising from this intimate association of so many young persons, so far from all the ordinary influences of society. Where so many young men are collected together, it is manifest that not a few will have been already addicted to habits of vice. It will, I fear, be found too generally true that the wicked are much more zealous in making proselytes than the virtuous; and here, as in any other case, the danger of contamination is greatly increased by the nearness of the contact. Older residents influence for evil those who have more recently entered. The succession is thus kept up, and he who has any tendency to vice will, in such a society, readily find associates and abettors. Young men are, to a proverb, frank and confiding. Entering upon a new scene, they easily become allied, without reflection, to those who have been long initiated, and who seem disposed to patronize them. In this manner associations are frequently formed in the very commencement of a collegiate course which give a sad if not a fatal tendency to the whole period, if not to the whole of a young man's subsequent life. The greater the number of young men associated together, and the more intimate this association, the greater is the danger from this cause. And yet

it is into precisely this danger that parents are anxious to plunge their sons at the earliest period at which it can be allowed" (p. 121-2).

Much more of this sort I would like to quote. Under the head of expensiveness he says:

In

"Let us ask whether it is economical to the community itself. . . consequence of this part of our system, I suppose that probably twelve hundred thousand dollars has been expended [in the New England colleges] upon bricks and mortar. If this be a necessary expense, no reasonable objection to it can be made, but, if otherwise, it is a most unfortunate misapplication of property. That it is not necessary is I think evident from the fact that by far the greater number of institutions of learning throughout the world do without it. That it possesses no peculiar advan tages is evident also from the fact that where this plan is adopted the expenses of an education are peculiarly great, and the students are not particularly moral" (p. 127).

He commences his closing paragraph in the following words: "From these considerations I have been led to doubt the wisdom of our present system, in respect to residence and discipline. I cannot perceive its advantages so clearly as most persons who are interested in college education, and I seem to myself to foresee advantages in a change which others may not so readily admit" (p. 131).

But, I may be asked, shall all college government be disbanded, and the young men be permitted to do as they please? Shall college officers be released from all responsibility for the morals and deportment of the boys-not men, always, in this country— committed to their care? Better abolish all the institutions rather than that the youth in them, for want of restraint, should go to ruin. The question is not whether such institutions can dispense with college government, but rather which is the best and most effective form of it. In the opinion of the writer of this paper,

THE TRUE SYSTEM OF COLLEGE GOVERNMENT

Is that which relies upon and employs influence chiefly rather than authority; which seeks the confidence of the young men and gains their hearts; which inspires them with self-respect; and seeks to control them by making them control themselves. The system. here advocated would avoid antagonisms, and secure kind social relations between professors and students, by inspiring mutual confidence and respect among all the members of the college community. It would segregate the students as much as possible by scattering them among the families of the town-subjecting them to the home-like influences of the household, and the conservative influences, daily exercised, of virtuous female society. Of course, this implies that there is nothing of just authority to be sacrificed, or anything of college law to be ignored or disregarded; for the college faculty or officer that permits students with impunity to trample under foot college law, or to fail to come up to college requirement, is contemned and despised, and cannot possibly be a party to administering the system of influence here advocated. I speak in favor of an influence which controls men-which, for that very reason, is a method of intentional GOVERNMENT. Impotency, and indifference that takes its ease, are in no danger of being mistaken for the thing referred to. But pretension, and bluster, and ostentatious self-assertion enter in no respect into that influence which controls men. He is the best manager of men who, while doing it, does not seem to do so; but who, a genuine man himself and unselfish, brings himself and his processes into harmony with human nature in general, and with the peculiarity of those with whom he has to deal, and then without ostentation,-if possible, without self-consciousness,-furnishes the occasion and applies the impulse to men, to make them manage themselves-rightly.

Let the college authorities gain the hearts of the young men, and command their confidence, and there will be no intentional disorder by day or by night, singly or in combination. This state