An American At Oxford Part 9

Even the university examinations became farcical. Under the Laudian statutes the very examiners became corrupt. Instead of a feast of reason and a flow of soul, the wary student provided his examiner with good meat and wine; and the two, with what company they bade in, got gloriously drunk together. B. A. meant Baccha.n.a.l of Arts. Even when the forms of examination were held to, the farce was only less obvious. A writer in _Terrae Filius_, March 24, 1721, tells us that the examination consisted in "a formal repet.i.tion of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in logick, which the candidates get by rote, or perhaps read out of their caps, which lie before them." These commodious sets of syllogisms were called strings, and descended from undergraduate to undergraduate in a regular succession like themes and mechanical drawings in an American club or fraternity. "I have in my custody a book of strings upon most or all of the questions discussed in a certain college noted for its ratiocinative faculty; on the first leaf of which are these words: _Ex dono Richardi P----e primae cla.s.si benefactoris munificentissimi_." Lord Eldon took his degree at University College by an examination that consisted of two questions: "What is the meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" It was, no doubt, the bearers of degrees thus achieved who owned those marvelous libraries of the eighteenth century, which consisted of pasteboard boxes exquisitely backed in tooled calf, and labeled with the names of the standard Greek and Latin cla.s.sics.

The decline of the university teaching and examination did not result in a corresponding rise in the colleges. Each of the dozen and more inst.i.tutions was supposed, as I have said, to keep a separate faculty in arts, and often in law and theology as well. If there had been any incentive to ambition, the colleges might have vied with one another in their impossible task, or at least have gone far enough to bring about a reform. But they were rich and did not care. The wealth of collegiate endowments, that had begun by ruining the university, ended by ruining the colleges. There were still earnest teachers and students at Oxford, but they were not the rule. The chief energies of the tutors were spent in increasing their salaries by a careful management of the estates, and in evading their pupils. In "the splendid foppery of a well-turned period" Gibbon thus pictures the dons of Magdalen in 1752: "Their deep and dull potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth." Only one result was possible. In 1821 T.

J. Hogg, Sh.e.l.ley's college-mate at University College, referred to Oxford as a seat of learning. "Why do you call it so?" Sh.e.l.ley cried indignantly. "Because," Hogg replied, "it is a place in which learning sits very comfortably, well thrown back as in an easy chair, and sleeps so soundly that neither you nor I nor anybody else can wake her." Permanent endowments had transferred the seat of learning from a n.o.bly indigent university to the colleges, and the deep and dull potations of endowed tutors had put it asleep on the common-room chairs.

The nineteenth century did not altogether arouse it. "The studies of the university," according to the testimony of the Oxford Commission of 1850, "were first raised from their abject state by a statute pa.s.sed in 1800." Heretofore all students had pursued the same studies, and there was no distinction to be gained at graduation except the mere fact of becoming a Bachelor of Arts. The statute of 1800 provided that such students as chose might distinguish themselves from the rest by taking honors; and for both pa.s.sman and honor man it provided a dignified and quite undebauchable university examining board. At first the subjects studied were, roughly speaking, the same for pa.s.sman and honor man; the difference was made by raising the standard of the honor examination. The examination followed the mediaeval custom in being mainly oral; and though it soon came to be written, it still preserves the tradition of the mediaeval disputation by including a _viva voce_ which is open to the attendance of the public. Throughout the nineteenth century the development consisted mainly in adding a few minor schools.

The good and bad features of the English college system as a whole should not be hard to distinguish. In all social aspects the colleges are as nearly perfect as human inst.i.tutions are capable of becoming, and they are the foundation of an unequaled athletic life.

Educationally, their qualities are mixed. For the purpose of common or garden English gentlemen, nothing could be better than a happy combination of tutorial instruction and university examining. For the purposes of scholarly instruction in general, and of instruction in the modern sciences and mechanic arts in particular, few things could be worse than the system as at present construed.

To exult over the superiority of American inst.i.tutions in so many of the things that make up a modern university would not be a very profitable proceeding. Let us neglect the imperfections of Oxford. It is of much greater profit to consider the extraordinary social advantages that arise from the division of the university into colleges, and the educational advantages of the honor schools. These are points with regard to which we are as poor as Oxford is poor in the scope of university instruction.

The point will perhaps be clearer for a brief review of the manner in which our college system grew out of the English. The development is the reverse of what we have just been considering. In England, the colleges overshadowed the university and sapped its life. With us, the university has overshadowed the college and is bidding fair to annihilate it.

VII

THE COLLEGE IN AMERICA

In 1636 the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts pa.s.sed an act to establish a "schoole or colledge," and set apart a tract of land in "New Towne" as its seat, which they called Cambridge. Our Puritan forefathers had carried from the English university the conviction that "sound learning" is the "root of true religion," and were resolved, in their own vigorous phrase, that it should not be "buried in the graves of the fathers." In 1638 a master of arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, John Harvard, bequeathed to the new inst.i.tution his library and half his fortune, some 780. A timber building was erected and a corporation formed which bore the donor's name. From the regulations in force in 1655 it is evident that in its manner of life, its laws of government, the studies taught, and the manner of granting the degree, Harvard College was a close counterpart of the English college of the early seventeenth century, its very phraseology including such terms as "disputing," "proceeding," "determining." It was the first inst.i.tution of higher education in British America. Until the founding of the first state university, the University of Virginia, in 1819, the const.i.tution afforded the princ.i.p.al model for subsequent foundations, and to-day colleges of the Harvard type are perhaps the strongest factor in American education. Harvard thus transplanted to American soil the full measure of the traditions of the Middle Ages, many of which exist in a modified form to-day.

In "Harvard College by an Oxonian" Dr. George Birkbeck Hill suggests that John Harvard expected others to found similar inst.i.tutions which collectively were to reproduce the University of Cambridge in New England. The supposition is by no means impossible, and the ma.n.u.script records in the Harvard Library would perhaps reward research. But whatever the intention, it is abundantly clear that in the full English sense of the word no second college was established at Cambridge. The first const.i.tution was in all essentials the same as that of to-day. Hutchinson's "History of Ma.s.sachusetts" records (1676): "There are but four fellows.h.i.+ps, the two seniors have each 30_l._ per ann. and the two juniors 15_l._, but no diet is allowed: There are tutors to all such as are admitted students.... The government of these colledges is in the governor and magistrates of Ma.s.sachusetts and the president of the colledge, together with the teaching elders of the six adjacent towns." The fellows are the forbears of the modern corporation, the tutors of the faculty; and though the inst.i.tution has been separated from the state, the "teaching elders" are the earliest overseers. Furthermore, the endowment of Harvard has remained undivided; and generations elapsed before the present very un-English division was made by which the teaching force is separated into independent faculties for arts and the various professions. From the first the "college" was a "university" in that it granted degrees; and less than twenty years after its founding the two terms are used as synonymous; an appendix to what is called the charter of Harvard "College" calls the inst.i.tution a "University." This confusion of terms still persists, and is found at most other American inst.i.tutions, the const.i.tutions of which were largely modeled after that of Harvard. For generations the endowments and the teaching force of the American college and university were identical. Thus as regards its const.i.tution the typical American university is a single English college writ large.

Almost from the outset, however, there were, in one sense of the word, several colleges. In "An Inventory of the whole Estate of Harvd Colledge taken by the President & Fellows as they find the same to be Decemb. 10, 1654," the first two items are as follows:--

"Imprs. The building called the old colledge, conteyning a Hall, Kitchen, b.u.t.tery, Cellar, Turrett & 5 Studeys & therin 7 chambers for students in them. A Pantry & small corne Chamber. A library & Books therin, vallued at 400lb.

"It. Another house called Goffes colledge, & was purchased of Edw: Goffe. conteyning five chambers. 18 studyes. a kitchen cellar & 3 garretts."[3]

It is to be noted that "Old Colledge," which was Harvard's building, had a kitchen, b.u.t.tery, and cellar, a pantry and a small corn chamber, and was thus primitively modeled after an English hall or college.

Presumably the inmates, like their cousins across the water, dined in the hall. As for "Goffe's colledge," granting that the punctuation of the inventory is intentional, it had a kitchen cellar, which would seem to imply a kitchen; and it is not impossible that there should be a comma after "kitchen." No hall is mentioned, and it is hardly likely that there could have been so imposing a room in what was built for a private house; but it would have been possible and natural to serve meals in the largest of the five "chambers." A third building Hutchinson's history describes as "a small brick building called the Indian Colledge, where some few Indians did study, but now it is a printing house," the first printing house in British America. The two earliest buildings at Harvard would thus be the abodes of separate communities, and though I can find no intimation as to the Indian College, it can scarcely be doubted that since it was established for the separate use of the redskins, it contained a separate living-plant. A later record shows that there was a separate kitchen in the first Stoughton Hall.

These early "colledges" at Harvard are more properly termed halls, and such as survived are now so called. They had probably little in common with the democratic English halls of the Middle Ages. Both at Oxford and at Cambridge the halls of the seventeenth century were, as I have said, mere pendants of the colleges; they must have had a separate character as a social community and a certain independence; but if they had separate endowments, they did not manage them, and each of them depended for its instruction mainly on the college to which it was affiliated. The printed records of the early American halls are too meagre to warrant definite conclusions; but they seem to show that the halls were conceived in the spirit of the English hall of the seventeenth century, in that they provided for separate social and residential communities without separate endowment or teaching force.

If the increase of students at Harvard had been rapid, it is not unlikely that many new halls would have been established, each the home of a complete community; but for half a century the number fluctuated between fifteen and thirty. If we take the English estimate of two hundred and fifty as the largest feasible size for a single community, the limit was not reached until as late as 1840. By 1676 the timber "colledge" built at the charge of Mr. Harvard, which bore his name, had been superseded by the first Harvard Hall, which Hutchinson describes as "a fair pile of brick building covered with tiles by reason of the late Indian warre not yet finished.... It contains twenty chambers for students, two in a chamber, a large hall which serves for a chapel; over that a convenient library." In these ample accommodations it was found that the student body could be most conveniently and cheaply fed as a single community. Thus, like the idea of a group of colleges with separate finances and teaching bodies, the idea of separate residential halls must have pa.s.sed away with the generation of divines educated in England. The American college and the American university remained identical, not only educationally and in their finances, but as a social organization.

This fact has caused a curious reversion in America toward the mediaeval type of university, both socially and educationally.

As the university has expanded, it has declined socially: to-day the residential life is only a degree better than that in the ancient chamberdekyns. Educationally, the reversion has been fortunate: the university is alive to the needs of the life about it. If it here resembles the modern German universities, this is largely due to the fact that both have more faithfully preserved the system and the spirit of the Middle Ages: the resemblance is quite as much a matter of native growth in America as of foreign imitation. In England, the mediaeval idea of a multiplicity of residential bodies has survived, and the educational idea of the mediaeval university has perished. In Germany, the educational idea has survived, and the old community life has perished. In America, the two ideas have survived by virtue of their ident.i.ty. But for the same reason both are in a rudimentary and very imperfect state of development.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] William G. Brown in _The Nation_, vol. 61, No. 1585, p. 346.

V

THE PROBLEMS OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

I

THE SOCIAL AND ATHLETIC PROBLEM

The imperfection of the modern American university in its social organization has been stated with the utmost clearness and authority, at least as regards Harvard. The "Harvard Graduates' Magazine" for September, 1894, published posthumously an article by Frank Bolles, late secretary of the college, ent.i.tled "The Administrative Problem."

"In the present state of affairs," says Mr. Bolles, "student social life is stunted and distorted.... There is something very ugly in the possibility of a young man's coming to Cambridge, and while here sleeping and studying alone in a cheerless lodging, eating alone in a dismal restaurant, feeling himself unknown, and so alone in his lectures, his chapel, and his recreations, and not even having the privilege of seeing his administrative officers, who know most of his record, without having to explain to them at each visit who he is and what he is, before they can be made to remember that he is a living, hoping, or despairing part of Harvard College."

Some of these men who fail to find a place in the social community meet their isolation grimly and are embittered against life. Others, after a few months or a year of lonesomeness and neglect, give up their university career broken-hearted, and by so doing perhaps take the first step in a life of failures. One man of whom I happened to know confided to his daily themes a depth of misery of which it can only be hoped that it was hysterical. At night when he heard a step on his staircase he prayed that it might be some one coming to see him.

The tide of undergraduate life and of joy in living flowed all about him and left him thirsting. If a man finds sweetness in the uses of such adversity, it can only be by virtue of the firmest and calmest of tempers. Sometimes fellows starve physically without a friend with whom to share their hards.h.i.+p, living perhaps on bread, milk, and oatmeal, which they cook over the study lamp. Occasionally one hears disquieting rumors that such short rations have resulted in disease and even death before the authorities were aware. If this be so, the hards.h.i.+ps of life in the earliest mediaeval university, though far enough removed from us to be picturesque, could hardly have been more real.

The sickness of the body politic has been portrayed with artistic sympathy and veracity by Mr. C. M. Flandrau, in his "Harvard Episodes," the wittiest and most searching of studies of undergraduate life. It is no doubt for this reason that the book is both read and resented by the healthy and unthinking college man.

To dwell on such individual instances would be unpleasant. The point of importance is to show how the social chaos affects the health of the community as a whole. As it happens, we have a barometer. For better or for worse, the moving pa.s.sion of the undergraduate body, aside from studies, is athletic success. If athletics prosper, it is because the life of the college finds an easy and natural expression; if athletics languish, there is pretty sure to be some check on wholesome functioning.

The causes of Harvard's abundant failures and the remedies have been a fertile theme of discussion. One cause is obvious. The rivals with distressing frequency have produced better teams. Every one knows that what Cambridge chooses to call Yale luck is nine parts Yale pluck; and the quality is well developed at Princeton, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. But why is it developed at these places more than at Harvard? The explanations are legion. The first cry was bad coaching.

This was repeated until the fault was corrected, at least in part, and until every one was wholly tired of hearing the explanation. Then came the cry of bad physical training. This in turn was repeated until it brought partial remedy and total weariness of the agitation. By and by, all other complaints having been worn threadbare, Harvard's defeat was attributed to the fog on Soldier's Field. It is not unlikely that the fog will be dissipated and the athletes duly benefited. Yet it is far from certain that this will make the athletic body sound.

The fault lies deeper than Yale pluck--or even the fog on Soldier's Field. It is to be found in the conditions, social, administrative, and even educational, which are at the basis of the life of the university. If these conditions were peculiar to Harvard, it would decidedly not be worth while to discuss them publicly. But they are inherent in the type of university of which Harvard is the earliest and most developed example, and are destined to crop out in every American inst.i.tution of learning in proportion as it grows, as Harvard has grown, from the English college of a few decades ago into the Teutonized university of the present and of the future. In considering the causes, it is necessary to speak concretely of our one eminent example; but the main fact brought out will be applicable in greater or less degree to the present or future of any American college.

The sources of Harvard's weakness are mainly social. When the college was small, it had its share of victory; but almost from the year when it began to outgrow its rivals, its prowess declined. Forty years ago, and even less, the undergraduate const.i.tution of American inst.i.tutions was, roughly speaking, that of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge: a freshman was measurably sure of falling into easy relations.h.i.+p with the fellows of his cla.s.s and of other cla.s.ses, and thus of finding his level or his pinnacle in athletic teams and in clubs. Considered as a machine for developing good fellows and good sportsmen, it was well adjusted and well oiled; it worked. But it was not capable of expansion. Two or three hundred fellows can live and even dine together with comfort and an increase of mutual understanding; they soon become an organized community. When a thousand or two live as a single community and dine at one board (let us call it dining), the social bond relaxes. Next door neighbors are unknown to one another, having no common ground of meeting, and even the college commons fail to bring them together. The relaxing influence of the hour spent at table and in the subsequent conversation, during which social intercourse should most freely flourish, is quite lost. The undergraduate body is a mob, or at best an aggregation of s.h.i.+fting cliques. If men live in crowds or in cliques, their life is that of crowds or of cliques, and is unprofitable both to themselves and to the community that should prosper by their loyal activity.

It is true that there are societies and clubs, but these also to a certain degree have been swamped in the rising tide of undergraduates.

With freshman cla.s.ses as large as those of to-day, the old social machinery becomes incapable of sifting the clubable from the less clubable, those who deserve recognition in the body of undergraduates from those who do not. The evil is increased by the fact that as a rule in America the social life is organized early in the undergraduate course, so that the men who fail of election in the first year or two have failed for good. There are, to be sure, cases in which men who have later developed signal merit have been taken into the all-important societies and clubs of the upper cla.s.smen, and sometimes these societies make a special and most creditable effort thus to remedy the failures of the system; but the men who are thus elected are an exception, and an exception of the kind that proves the rule. Unless a man has been prominent in one of the large preparatory schools, or becomes prominent in athletics in the first year or so, there is only one way to make sure of meeting such fellows as he wishes to know, and that is both to choose friends and to avoid them with an eye to social chances, a method which is scarcely to be commended. As the incoming cla.s.ses grow larger, there is an increasingly large proportion of undergraduates who fail to qualify in the first year or two in any of these ways. Throughout their course they neither receive benefit from the general life of the university nor contribute to it. They are often of loyal and disinterested character, and they not infrequently develop into men of exceptional ability in all of the paths of undergraduate life; not a few of them have been 'varsity captains. But instead of exerting the influence on the welfare of the university which such men might and should exert, they find it impossible to get into the main currents, and revolve impotently on the outside, each in the particular eddy where fate has thrust him.

At Harvard, where the evil has long been recognized, a remedy has been sought in increasing the members.h.i.+p of the great soph.o.m.ore and senior societies, the Inst.i.tute of 1770 and the Hasty Pudding Club. The result has been the reverse of what was intended. The larger the club the less compact its life and its influence,--what a few men have gained the club has lost. The tendency toward disintegration is confirmed by a peculiarity of the organization of the societies. The first half of the members of the Inst.i.tute form a separate club, the D. K. E., or d.i.c.key. From this the second half are excluded, becoming a sort of social fringe; they often form a part of the mob that dines at Memorial or of the cliques that dine in boarding-houses, and are only a shade less excluded than the rest from the centres of the college life. If this inner club, the d.i.c.key, were the instrument of a united and efficient public spirit, the case would not be so bad, but its members in turn are split into a number of small clubs; as a social organization the d.i.c.key is mainly a name. If now these small clubs took a strong part in the general life of the college, the case would still not be so bad; but each spends its main strength in struggling with the others to secure as many members as possible from the first ten of the d.i.c.key. They are scarcely to be regarded as engines of public spirit.

The same is true of the great senior society, the Hasty Pudding. Its most prominent members belong to the few small clubs of upper cla.s.smen; the rest are as much a social fringe as the later tens of the Inst.i.tute. And the senior clubs, like the clubs of the under cla.s.smen, are more interested in their private politics than in the policy of the college as a whole. At Yale the senior societies still exert a strong and generally wholesome influence, but at Harvard they have long ceased to do so, if they ever did. In proportion as a man is successful in the social world the system lifts him out of the body of undergraduate life. The reward of athletic distinction or of good-fellows.h.i.+p is a sort of pool pocket, upon getting into which a man is definitely out of the game. The leaders in the college life, social and athletic, are chosen on the superficial tests of the freshman year, and are not truly representative; and the organization of which they become a part is calculated only to suppress general and efficient public spirit. The outer layers are dead wood and the kernels sterile. This is at least one reason why Harvard does not oftener win.

In all this there is no place for a philosophy of despair. The spirit of the undergraduate, clubbed and unclubbed, is normal and sound. The efforts which the clubs themselves make from time to time to become representative are admirably public spirited; and there is no less desire on the part of the outsiders to live for the best interests of the college. On the day of an athletic contest the university is behind the team, heart and lungs; and when defeat comes it is felt alike by all conditions of men. From time to time ancient athletes journey to Cambridge to exhort the undergraduate body to pull together; and it is a poor orator indeed who cannot set in motion strong currents of enthusiasm. Half an hour of earnest talk on the strenuous life from Theodore Roosevelt has often been known to raise a pa.s.sion of aspiration that has positively lasted for weeks. But the social system cannot be galvanized into life and functioning. The undergraduates aspire and strive, but every effort is throttled by a Little Old Man of the Sea. When all is said and done, the mob and the cliques remain mob and cliques; with discord within and exclusive without, there is small hope of organized efficiency.

At Yale the oligarchic spirit of the senior societies is compact and operative where that of the Harvard clubs is not; but Yale also is being swamped. The vast and increasing mob of the unaffiliated has several times within the last decade shown a shocking disrespect for the sacred authority of the captains; and the non-representative character of the soph.o.m.ore societies, from which the senior societies are recruited, has been a public scandal. One result of this disorder is that the ancient athletic prestige is slipping away, or is so far in abeyance that it is again a question whether Harvard or Yale has--shall we say the worse team? The case of the older universities is typical. Other inst.i.tutions are expanding as fast or faster, and it is only a question of time when the increase of numbers will swamp the social system.

That there is something rotten in the state of Denmark has of late been officially recognized, at least at Harvard. In order to create a general social and athletic life in the community a Union has been established, modeled on the Oxford Union. It would be pleasant to picture the College House of the future shaking hands with Claverly, the Phi Beta Kappa linking elbows with the Porcellian, and the fellows who now, in spite of a desire to be sociable, have lived through four years of solitary confinement each in his petty circle, enjoying the bosom friends.h.i.+p of all the men they may desire to know. It would be pleasant but perhaps not altogether warrantable, when one considers the essential nature of the Union.

The Oxford Union of celebrity, as has been pointed out in an earlier chapter, is a thing of the past. It was an exclusive inst.i.tution, in which no attempt was made to foster universal brotherhood. When it was thrown open to the entire undergraduate world, it lost caste and authority. The elect flocked by themselves each in his own exclusive club. If the Harvard Union had been modeled on the old exclusive Oxford Union, it might perhaps have been equally efficient in bringing together a broadly representative body of men. But it was modeled on the modern democratic Union. Here is a plain case: When the Oxford Union ceased to be exclusive, its best elements flocked by themselves, and the result is a growth of small exclusive clubs. At Harvard the exclusive clubs and societies are both ancient and honorable, and, moreover, very comfortable, and it hardly seems likely that their members will rout themselves out of their cosy corners to join the merry rout at the Harvard Union.

This is not to cast a gloomy eye upon the new university club; it is rather by way of emphasizing the importance of the work it has to do, and will succeed in doing. Hitherto the lounging grounds of the unaffiliated (alas! that in such an alma mater so many are forever unaffiliated!) have been public billiard-rooms and tobacco shops. For the solace of a midnight supper one had to go to the locally familiar straw-hatted genius of the sandwich, and for the luxury of a late breakfast to John of the Holly Tree. And John the Orange Man! Great worthies these, ancient and most honorable. But even in the enchantment of retrospect they somehow or other explain why so many fellows choose to live, for the most part, in small cliques in one another's rooms and cultivate the deadly chafing-dish. For the unaffiliated--by far the larger part of each cla.s.s--the new club-house will be a G.o.dsend. It is much more fun to cut a nine-o'clock lecture if you are sure of a comfortable chair at breakfast and a real napkin; and even in the brutal gladness of youth, it is pleasant at a midnight supper to be seated. And then, after that athletic dinner at Memorial, a place to loaf quietly over a pipe with whatever congenial spirit one finds, and listen to the clicking of billiard-b.a.l.l.s! It is also proposed that the 'varsity athletes have their training tables at the new Union, so that any fellow may come to know them clothed and in their right minds. I fancy that the new club will leave those old worthies a trifle lonesome, and will banish the chafing-dish forever.

The spirit of an old graduate somehow takes kindly to the idea of a place like that. How the spirit of Bishop Brooks, for instance, would enjoy slipping in of an evening for the cigar they have denied him in the house erected in his memory! And for the graduate in the flesh the club-house will be no less welcome, especially if he is unlucky enough not to have a club of his own to go back to. To love one's alma mater it is, of course, not necessary to have a club; but it somehow interferes with the sentiment of a home-coming to be obliged to go back to Boston by trolley for luncheon and dinner, and to eat it among aliens. In the new Union it will even be possible to put up for the night. A long step has been made in advance of the old unhappy order.

Yet the new Union leaves the vital evil in the community life as far as ever from solution.

What the authorities have failed to do consciously may, according to present indications, be accomplished, in some manner at least, by an unconscious growth. When Memorial became inadequate to the mere demand for seating-room, new dining-halls were established. In the future it is possible that these new halls may be kept within the line where community life becomes impossible and mob life begins. If they could be, the problem would be at least one step nearer solution. But to gain the highest effect of community organization, it is necessary that the men who dine in the same hall shall live near one another.

Under the present system this rarely happens, and when it does, it does not even follow that they know one another by sight. Until the halls represent some real division in undergraduate life--separate and organized communities--they must remain the resort of a student mob.

Fortunately, another movement is discernible in the direction of separate residential organization. Already certain of the dormitories in American universities are governed democratically by the inmates: no student is admitted except by order of a committee of the members.

The fraternity houses so widely diffused in America offer a still better example, almost a counterpart, of the halls of the golden age of the mediaeval university. Any considerable development of hall or fraternity life in the great universities would result in a dual organization of the kind that has proved of such advantage in England, so that a man would have his residence in a small democratic community, and satisfy his more special interests in the exclusive clubs of the university. In such an arrangement the hall would profit by the clubman as the clubman would gain influence through the hall.

All undergraduates would thus be united in the general university life in a way which is now undreamed of, and which is unlikely, as I think, even in the new Harvard Union.

The tendency toward division in the dining-halls and the dormitories is evident also in athletics; but here it is very far from unconscious. The division by cla.s.ses long ago ceased to be an adequate means of developing material for the 'varsity teams, and when the English rowing coach, Mr. R. C. Lehmann, was in charge of the Harvard oarsmen, he outlined a plan for developing separate crews not unlike the college crews of England. This system has since been effected with excellent results. Separate boating clubs have been established, each of which has races among its own crews and races with the crews of its rivals. Only one thing has prevented the complete success of the system. The division into clubs is fact.i.tious, representing no real rivalry such as exists among English colleges. To supply this rivalry, it is only necessary that each boat club shall represent a hall. The same division would of course be equally of benefit in all branches of sport. The various teams within the university would then represent a real social rivalry, such as has long ceased to exist. This could scarcely fail to produce the effect that has been so remarkable at the English universities. As in England, a multiplication of contests would on the one hand develop far better university material, and on the other hand it would lessen rather than exaggerate the excessive importance of intercollegiate contests.