Saliforn 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 L. Campbell
 
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 Htoersfoe iliterature %>tne$ 
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 
 
 ESSAYS REPRINTED FROM 
 
 "SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND CHARACTER" 
 
 AND "ROUTINE AND IDEALS" 
 
 BY 
 
 LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
 
 Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences 
 Harvard University 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION Hi 
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM SCHOOL TO COLLEGE i 
 
 THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE LIFE .... 23 
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 63 
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 8 9 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1901 AND 1904, BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 (Cbc tjilicr.sibc 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A
 
 Education 
 Library 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THIS volume contains two essays from 
 h School, College, and Character and two 
 >5> addresses from Routine and Ideals. It 
 includes those parts of each book which 
 the editor regards as suitable for college 
 students in general, and excludes those 
 parts which chiefly concern parents, ele- 
 ^ mentary and secondary schools, or stu- 
 * dents in Harvard College. It is, there- 
 f fore, a small collection of old writings 
 j newly combined for a special purpose. 
 
 If I were rewriting the essay on Col- 
 i lege Honor, I should give more space to 
 the apathy of many students regarding 
 their debts whether their debts as in- 
 dividuals or the collective debts of their 
 clubs. I might also give more space to 
 the Honor System, about which my feel- 
 ing has not materially changed. I still 
 feel that the system ministers to a mis- 
 taken sensitiveness, endangers the au- 
 
 288681
 
 iv INTRODUCTION 
 
 thenticity of the college degree, imposes 
 on the conscientious student a duty he is 
 better off without, and, when it requires 
 every man to certify that he has received 
 no help, defeats in great part its own end 
 by substituting avowed distrust of every- 
 body for distrust of the few and protec- 
 tion of all. Yet I believe, with eager- 
 ness, that a college officer should, for 
 every reason, whether of fairness or of 
 mere policy, accept the word of a stu- 
 dent so long as he can, and should main- 
 tain with him the openest relation com- 
 patible with the rights of others. Nor is 
 this belief inconsistent with my attitude 
 toward the Honor System. 
 
 These remarks about the Honor Sys- 
 tem may hint at the justification of the 
 editor in reprinting the essays and ad- 
 dresses. Though the material may be 
 old, the subjects can never lose their fresh- 
 ness so long as youth is youth. 
 
 L. B. R. BRIGGS. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, January, 1913.
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 
 
 COLLEGE life is the supreme privilege of 
 youth. Rich men's sons from private 
 schools may take it carelessly, as some- 
 thing to enjoy unearned, like their own 
 daily bread; yet the true title to it is the 
 title earned in college day by day. The 
 privilege of entering college admits to 
 the privilege of deserving college ; col- 
 lege life belongs to the great things, at 
 once joyous and solemn, that are not to 
 be entered into lightly. 
 
 Now the things that are not to be 
 entered into lightly (such as marriage 
 and the ministry) are often the things 
 that men enter prepared viciously or not 
 prepared at all; and college life is no 
 exception. " There had always lain a
 
 2 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 pleasant notion at the back of his head,'* 
 says Mr. Kipling of Harvey Cheyne's 
 father, who had left the boy to the care 
 of a useless wife, " that some day, when 
 he had rounded off everything and the 
 boy had left college, he would take his 
 son to his heart and lead him into his 
 possessions. Then that boy, he argued, 
 as busy fathers do, would instantly be- 
 come his companion, partner, and ally; 
 and there would follow splendid years 
 of great works carried out together, 
 the old head backing the young fire." 
 Such fatal gaps in calculation, common 
 with preoccupied fathers, are not un- 
 common with teachers, the very men 
 whose lifework is fitting boys for life. 
 
 To prepare a boy for examinations 
 that admit to college requires skill, but 
 is easy ; to prepare a boy for college is 
 a problem that no teacher and no school 
 has ever solved. In the widest sense, the 
 transition from school to college is almost 
 coincident with the transition from youth
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 3 
 
 to manhood, often a time when the 
 physical being is excitable and ill con- 
 trolled, when the mind suffers from the 
 lassitude of rapid bodily growth, and 
 when the youth's whole conception of 
 his relation to other people is distorted 
 by conceit. Sensitive to his own impor- 
 tance, just beginning to know his power 
 for good or evil, he is shot into new and 
 exciting surroundings, out of a disci- 
 pline that drove and held him with whip 
 and rein into a discipline that trusts him 
 to see the road and to travel in it. If 
 we add to this the new and alluring argu- 
 ments for vice as an expression of fully 
 developed manhood, we have some no- 
 tion of the struggle in which a boy 
 away from home, it may be, for the first 
 time is expected to conquer. The 
 best school is the school that best pre- 
 pares him for this struggle ; not the 
 school that guards him most sternly or 
 most tenderly, nor the school that guards 
 him not at all, but the school that stead-
 
 4 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 fly increases his responsibility, and as 
 steadily strengthens him to meet it. The 
 best college is the college that makes 
 him a man. 
 
 The first feeling of a Freshman is 
 confusion; the next is often a strange 
 elation at the discovery that now at last 
 his elders have given him his head. " I 
 never shall forget," says a noted preacher, 
 " how I felt when I found myself a Fresh- 
 man, a feeling that all restraint was 
 gone, and that I might go to the Devil 
 just as fast as I pleased." This is the 
 transition from school to college. 
 
 In a man's life there must be, as every- 
 body knows, a perilous time of going out 
 into the world * to many it comes at the 
 beginning of a college course; to many 
 possibly to most who go to college at 
 all it has already come at school. The 
 larger and less protected boarding school 
 or academy is constantly threatened with 
 every vice known to a college ; the clois- 
 tered private school affords, from its lack
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 5 
 
 of opportunity for some vices, peculiar 
 temptation to others ; the day school, if 
 in or near a large city, contains boys for 
 whose bad habits, not yet revealed, their 
 parents by and by will hold the college 
 responsible. I remember a group of 
 boys going daily from cultivated homes 
 to an excellent school, each of whom, in 
 college, came to one grief or another, 
 and each of whom, I am convinced, had 
 made straight at home and at school the 
 way to that grief. The transition from 
 school to college was merely the contin- 
 uation in a larger world of what they 
 had begun in a smaller. 
 
 A continuation is what the transition 
 ought to be : the problem is how to 
 make it a continuation of the right sort. 
 " What is the matter with your col- 
 lege *? " says a teacher who cares beyond 
 all else for the moral and religious wel- 
 fare of his pupils. "I keep my boys 
 for years : I send them to you in Sep- 
 tember, and by Christmas half of them
 
 6 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 have degenerated. They have lost punc- 
 tuality ; they have lost application ; they 
 have no responsibility ; and some of them 
 are gone to the bad." "What is the 
 matter with your school," the college 
 retorts, "that in half a dozen years it 
 cannot teach a boy to stand up three 
 months ? College is the world ; fitting 
 for college is fitting for life : what is the 
 matter with your school *? " He who 
 loses his ideals loses the very bloom of 
 life. To see a young man's ideals rap- 
 idly slipping away, while his face grows 
 coarser and coarser, is one of the saddest 
 sights in college or out of it. What 
 is his training good for, if it has not 
 taught him the folly, the misery, and the 
 wrong of dabbling in evil? If he must 
 believe that no man is wise till he has 
 come to know the resorts of gamblers 
 and harlots, and has indulged himself 
 for experience' sake in a little gentle- 
 manly vice, can he not put off the ac- 
 quaintance four years more, by the end
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 7 
 
 of which time he may have learned 
 some wiser way of getting wisdom? 
 Besides, in the course of those four 
 years (and the chance is better than 
 even) he may meet some girl for whose 
 sake he will be glad that his record has 
 been clean. Cannot a school which 
 closely watches its boys while their 
 characters are moulding teach them to 
 keep their heads level and their hearts 
 true, save them from the wrong that 
 never can be righted, send them to col- 
 lege and through college, faulty it must 
 be, but at least unstained? 
 
 The main object of school and college 
 is the same, to establish character, and 
 to make that character more efficient 
 through knowledge ; to make moral 
 character more efficient through mental 
 discipline. In the transition from school 
 to college, continuity of the best influ- 
 ence, mental and moral, is the thing 
 most needful. Oddly enough, the only 
 continuity worthy of the name is often
 
 8 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 (in its outward aspect) neither mental 
 nor moral, but athletic. An athlete is 
 watched at school as an athlete, enters 
 college as an athlete; and if he is a 
 good athlete, and if he takes decent care 
 of his body, he continues his college 
 course as an athlete, with new expe- 
 riences, it is true, but always with the 
 thread of continuity fairly visible, and 
 with the relation of training to success 
 clearly in view. Palpably bad as the 
 management of college athletics has 
 been and is, misleading as the predomi- 
 nance of athletics in an institution of 
 learning may be, the fact remains that 
 in athletics lies a saving, power, and that 
 for many a boy no better bridge of the 
 gap between school and college has yet 
 been found. The Freshman athlete, left 
 to himself, is likely to fall behind in his 
 studies ; but unless he is singularly un- 
 reasonable or vicious, he is where an 
 older student of clear head and strong 
 will can keep him straight, can at
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 9 
 
 least save him from those deplorable 
 falls that, to a greater or less degree, 
 bruise and taint a whole life. " The 
 trouble will begin," said a wise man, 
 talking to sub-Freshmen, "in the first 
 fortnight. Some evening you will be 
 with a lot of friends in somebody's 
 room, when something is proposed that 
 you know is n't just right. Stop it if 
 you can ; if not, go home and go to bed, 
 and in the morning you will be glad you 
 did n't stay." The first danger in the 
 transition from boyhood to manhood is 
 the danger in what is called " knowing 
 life." It is so easy to let mere vulgar 
 curiosity pose as the search for truth. 
 A Senior who had been in a fight at a 
 public dance said in defence of himself: 
 " I think I have led a pretty clean life 
 in these four years ; but I believe that 
 going among all sorts of people and 
 knowing them is the best thing college 
 life can give us." The old poet knew 
 better :
 
 io THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 "Let no man say there, 'Virtue's flinty wall 
 Shall lock vice in me ; I '11 do none but know all. 
 
 Men are sponges, which, to pour out, receive ; 
 Who know false play, rather than lose, deceive ; 
 
 For in best understandings sin began ; 
 
 Angels sinned first, then devils, and then man. " 
 
 Here comes in to advantage the am- 
 bition of the athlete. Football begins 
 with or before the college year. Train- 
 ing for football means early hours, clean 
 life, constant occupation for body and 
 mind. Breach of training means ostra- 
 cism. That this game tides many a 
 Freshman over a great danger, by keep- 
 ing him healthily occupied, I have come 
 firmly to believe. It supplies what Pre- 
 sident Eliot calls a "new and effective 
 motive for resisting all sins which weaken 
 or corrupt the body;" it appeals to 
 ambition and to self-restraint; it gives 
 to crude youth a task in which crude 
 youth can' attain finish and skill, can 
 feel the power that comes of surmount- 
 ing tremendous obstacles and of recog-
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE n 
 
 nition for surmounting them ; moreover, 
 like war, it affords an outlet for the reck- 
 less courage of young manhood, the 
 same reckless courage that in idle days 
 drives young men headlong into vice. 
 
 Has not hard study, also, a saving 
 power ? Yes, for some boys ; but for a 
 boy full of animal spirits, and not spurred 
 to intellectual effort by poverty, the pres- 
 sure is often too gentle, the reward too 
 remote. Such a youth may be, in the 
 first place, too well pleased with himself 
 to understand his relation to his fellow 
 men and the respectability of labor. He 
 may fail to see that college life does not 
 of itself make a man distinguished ; in 
 a vague way, he feels that the university 
 is gratefully ornamented by his presence. 
 No human creature can be more com- 
 placent than a Freshman, unless it is a 
 Sophomore : yet the Freshman may be 
 simply a being who, with no particular 
 merit of his own, has received a great 
 opportunity ; and the Sophomore may
 
 12 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 be simply a being who has abused that 
 opportunity for a year. 
 
 Now the Freshman meets, in a large 
 modern college, a new theory of intel- 
 lectual discipline. As Professor Peabody 
 has beautifully expressed it, he passes 
 " from the sense of study as an obligation 
 to the sense of study as an opportunity." 
 Too often he regards study as an inferior 
 opportunity ; and having an option be- 
 tween study and loafing, he takes loafing. 
 " In the Medical School," said a first- 
 year medical student, " they give you a 
 lot to do ; and nobody cares in the least 
 whether you do it." In other words, the 
 Medical School may rely on the com- 
 bined stimulus of intellectual ambition 
 and bread and butter : its Faculty need 
 not prod or cosset ; it is a place of Devil 
 take the hindmost. Yet the change in 
 the attitude of teacher to pupil is not 
 more sharply marked between college 
 and medical school than between prepar- 
 atory school and college. " There are
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 13 
 
 only two ways of getting work out of 
 a boy" said a young college graduate. 
 "One is through emulation; the other 
 is to stand behind and kick him. 1 Mr. 
 X [a well-known schoolmaster] says, 
 * Jones, will you please do this or that ; ' 
 Mr. Y stands behind Jones and kicks 
 him into college." I do not accept the 
 young graduate's alternative ; but I have 
 to admit that many boys are kicked, or 
 whipped, or cosseted, or otherwise per- 
 sonally conducted into college, and, once 
 there, are as hopelessly lost as a baby 
 turned loose in London. " It took me 
 about two years in college to get my 
 bearings," said an earnest man, now a 
 superintendent of schools. "I didn't 
 loaf; I simply did n't know how to get 
 at things. In those days there was no- 
 body to go to for advice; and I had 
 never read anything, had never been 
 inside of a public library. I did n't 
 know where or how to take hold." 
 
 1 Both ways are known in football, besides what 
 is called "cursing up."
 
 i 4 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 This is the story of a man who longed 
 to take hold; and we must remember 
 that many of our college boys do not at 
 first care whether they take hold or not. 
 It is only in football, not in study, that 
 they have learned to tackle, and to tackle 
 low. " A bolstered boy," says a wise mo- 
 ther, " is an unfortunate man." Many of 
 these boys have been bolstered ; many 
 are mothers' boys ; many have crammed 
 day and night through the hot season to 
 get into college, and, once in, draw a 
 long breath and lie down. The main 
 object of life is attained ; and for any 
 secondary object they are too tired to 
 work. The old time-table of morning 
 school gives place to a confusing arrange- 
 ment which spreads recitations and lec- 
 tures unevenly over the different days. 
 They walk to a large lecture room, where 
 a man who is not going to question them 
 that day talks for an hour, more or less 
 audibly. He is a long way off; 1 and 
 
 1 A student whose name begins with Y told me 
 once that he had never had a good seat in his life.
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 15 
 
 though he is talking to somebody, he 
 seems not to be talking to them. It is 
 hard to listen ; and if they take notes (a 
 highly educational process) the notes will 
 be poor : besides, if they need notes, they 
 can buy them later. Why not let the 
 lecture go, and sleep, or carve the furni- 
 ture, or think about something else (girls, 
 for instance) *? These boys are in a poor 
 frame of mind for new methods of in- 
 struction ; yet new methods of instruc- 
 tion they must have. They must learn 
 to depend upon themselves, to become 
 men ; and they must learn that hardest 
 lesson of all, that a man's freedom 
 consists in binding himself: still again, 
 they must learn these things at an age 
 when the average boy has an ill-seasoned 
 body, a half-trained mind, jarred nerves, 
 his first large sum of money, all manner 
 of diverting temptations, and a profound 
 sense of his own importance. How can 
 they be taken down, and not taken down 
 too much, thrown, and not thrown too
 
 16 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 hard ? How can they be taught the re- 
 sponsibility of freedom ? They face, it 
 may be, an elective system which, at first 
 sight, seems to make elective, not this or 
 that study merely, but the habit of study- 
 ing at all. Already they have been weak- 
 ened by the failure of the modern parent 
 and the modern educator to see steadily 
 the power that is born of overcoming 
 difficulties. What the mind indolently 
 shrinks from is readily mistaken, by fond 
 mothers, mercenary tutors, and seme bet- 
 ter people, as not suited to the genius of 
 the boy in question. " It is too much 
 for Jamie to learn those stupid rules of 
 syntax, when he has a passion for natural 
 history ; " or, " George never could learn 
 geometry, and after all, we none of us 
 use geometry in later life. He expects 
 to be a lawyer, like his father; and I 
 can't think of any good geometry can 
 do him." 
 
 The change "from the sense of study 
 as an obligation to the sense of study as
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 17 
 
 an opportunity" is a noble change for 
 persons mature enough to turn oppor- 
 tunity into obligation : it is not a noble 
 change for those who choose such studies 
 only as they think they can pass with 
 bought notes. Knowledge that does not 
 overcome difficulties, knowledge that 
 merely absorbs what it can without dis- 
 agreeable effort, is not power; it is not 
 even manly receptivity. Milton, to be 
 sure, patient toiler and conqueror though 
 he was, cried in his pain, " God loves not 
 to plough out the heart of our endeavors 
 with overhard and sad tasks : " but an 
 overhard and sad task may be a plain 
 duty ; and even Milton, when he said 
 this, was trying to get rid of what some 
 people would call a plain duty, his 
 wife. When we consider the mass and 
 the variety of the Freshmen's tempta- 
 tions, and what some one has called the 
 " strain on their higher motives," we 
 wonder more and more at the strength of 
 the temptation to knowledge, whereby so
 
 i8 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 many stand steady, and work their way 
 out into clear-headed and trustworthy 
 manhood. 
 
 One way to deal with these strange, 
 / excited, inexperienced, and intensely hu- 
 man things called Freshmen is to let them 
 flounder till they drown or swim ; and 
 this way has been advocated by men who 
 have no boys of their own. It is de- 
 lightfully simple, if we can only shut eye 
 and ear and heart and conscience ; and 
 it has a kind of plausibility in the ex- 
 amples of men who through rough usage 
 have achieved strong character. " The 
 objection," as the master of a great school 
 said the other day, " is the waste ; and," 
 he added, " it is such an awful thing to 
 waste human life ! " This method is a 
 cruel method, ignoring all the sensibili- 
 ties of that delicate, high-strung instru- 
 ment which we call the soul. If none 
 but the fittest survived, the cruelty might 
 be defended; but some, who unhappily 
 cannot drown, become cramped swim-
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 19 
 
 mers for all their days. Busy and worn 
 as a college teacher usually is, thirsty 
 for the advancement of learning as he 
 is assumed always to be, he cannot let 
 hundreds of young men pass before him, 
 unheeded and unfriended. At Harvard 
 College, the Faculty, through its system 
 of advisers for Freshmen, has made a 
 beginning : and though there are hardly 
 enough advisers to go round, the system 
 has proved its usefulness. At Harvard 
 College, also, a large committee of 
 Seniors and Juniors has assumed some 
 responsibility for all the Freshmen. Each 
 undertakes to see at the beginning of 
 the year the Freshmen assigned to him, 
 and to give every one of them, besides 
 kindly greeting and good advice, the 
 feeling that an experienced undergradu- 
 ate may be counted on as a friend in 
 need. 
 
 Whether colleges should guard their 
 students more closely than they do 
 whether, for example, they should with
 
 20 THE TRANSITION FROM 
 
 gates and bars protect their dormitories 
 against the inroads of bad women is 
 an open question. For the deliberately 
 vicious such safeguards would amount 
 to nothing ; but for the weak they might 
 lessen the danger of sudden temptation. 
 Of what schools should do I can say 
 little ; for with schools I have little expe- 
 rience : but this I know, that some sys- 
 tem of gradually increased responsibility 
 is best in theory, and has proved good in 
 practice. The scheme of making the 
 older and more influential boys " pre- 
 fects" has worked well in at least one 
 large preparatory school, and shows its 
 excellence in the attitude of the prefects 
 when they come to college. This scheme 
 makes a confident appeal to the maturity 
 of some boys and the reasonableness of 
 all, trusting all to see that the best hopes 
 of teacher and scholar are one and the 
 same. 
 
 The system of gradually increased
 
 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 21 
 
 responsibility at school must be met half- 
 way by the system of friendly supervision 
 at college, supervision in which the 
 older undergraduates are quite as impor- 
 tant as the Faculty. The Sophomore who 
 enjoys hazing (like the dean who em- 
 ploys spies) is an enemy to civilization. 
 The true state of mind, whether for pro- 
 fessor or for student, was expressed by 
 a college teacher long ago. " 1 hold it," 
 he said, " a part of my business to do 
 what I can for any wight that comes to 
 this place." When all students of all 
 colleges, and all boys of all schools, be- 
 lieve, and have the right to believe, that 
 their teachers are their friends ; when 
 the educated public recognizes the truth 
 that school and college should help each 
 other in lifting our youth to the high 
 ground of character, the school never 
 forgetting that boys are to be men, and 
 the college never forgetting that men 
 have been boys, we shall come to the
 
 22 SCHOOL TO COLLEGE 
 
 ideal of education. Toward this ideal we 
 are moving, slowly but steadily. When 
 we reach it, or even come so near it as 
 to see it always, we shall cease to dread 
 the transition from school to college.
 
 THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE 
 LIFE 
 
 IN a certain sense, college is the place 
 for mistakes. In college a young man 
 tests his strength, and, while testing it, 
 is protected from the results of failure far 
 more effectively than he will ever be pro- 
 tected afterward. The youth who is de- 
 termined to succeed in public speaking 
 may stand up again and again in a col- 
 lege debating club, may fail again and 
 again, and through his failure may rise 
 to success ; whereas if he should put off 
 his efforts until some political campaign 
 had called him to the stump, no audience 
 would listen to him, or even let him go
 
 24 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 on. " The mistakes that make us men," 
 says Dr. Lyman Abbott, " are better than 
 the accuracies that keep us children." 
 Yet even in college there are mistakes 
 by which the career of a happy, well- 
 meaning youth is suddenly darkened ; 
 and though he may learn out of the very 
 bitterness of his experience, he is never 
 quite the same again. 
 
 All boys with a fair chance in the world 
 have at their best a common motive, 
 to be of some use, to lead active, efficient 
 lives, to do something worth doing, and 
 to do it well, to become men on whom 
 people instinctively and not in vain rely. 
 Men and women may be divided roughly 
 into two classes, those who are "there," 
 and those who are " not there." The 
 "not there" people may be clever, 
 may be what is called " good company," 
 may have, even after you know them 
 pretty well, a good deal of personal 
 charm ; but once know them through 
 and through, and you have no use for
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 25 
 
 them. The " there " people may be un- 
 polished, unmagnetic, without social 
 charm ; but once understand that they 
 are " there," and you get help and com- 
 fort from the mere knowledge that there 
 are such people in the world. Every boy 
 in his heart of hearts admires a man who 
 is " there," and wishes to be like him ; 
 but not every boy (and here is the sad 
 part of it) understands that to be " there" 
 is the result of a long process, the result 
 of training day by day and year by year, 
 precisely as to be a sure man (I do not 
 say a brilliant man) in the pitcher's box 
 or behind the bat is the result of long 
 training. A single decision or indecision, 
 an act of a moment or a moment's fail- 
 ure to act, may turn a whole life awry ; 
 but the weakness of that moment is only 
 the expression of a weakness which for 
 months or for years has been undermin- 
 ing the character, or at best the result of 
 a failure to train body, mind, and heart 
 for the emergencies of life.
 
 26 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 In this training we can learn, if we 
 will, from other people's experience ; and 
 although boys are loath to accept any- 
 body's experience but their own, and are 
 not always wise enough to accept that, 
 it is yet worth while to show them some 
 dangers which other boys have met or 
 have failed to meet, that they may not 
 be taken unawares. A great man, almost 
 too far above the temptations of the aver- 
 age boy to understand them, has con- 
 demned talking to boys and young men 
 about temptation ; he would fill their 
 minds with good things : but there are 
 no boys whose minds are so full of good 
 things that a temptation cannot get in 
 edgewise. An absorbing interest in a 
 good something or a good somebody 
 holds back and may finally banish the 
 worst temptations ; it is quite as impor- 
 tant to interest boys in good things as 
 to take away their interest in bad ones : 
 but when all is said, the lightest hearted 
 boy who comes to manhood must come
 
 * COLLEGE LIFE 27 
 
 to it "through sorrows and through 
 scars." 
 
 To many boys the beginning of col- 
 lege life is the first step into the world. 
 Its dangers are much like those of other 
 first steps into the world, yet with this 
 difference : the college boy has the ad- 
 vantage of living where ideals are noble, 
 and the disadvantage (if he is weak or 
 immature) of living where he need not 
 get heartily tired day after day in keep- 
 ing long, inevitable hours of work. This 
 disadvantage is indeed a privilege, but a 
 privilege which like all privileges is bad 
 unless accorded to a responsible being. 
 To discipline one's self, to hold one's self 
 responsible, is ever so much better than 
 to be disciplined, to be held responsible 
 by somebody else ; but it is a task for a 
 man. Naturally enough, then, the mis- 
 takes and the sins of college life are 
 commonly rooted in boyish irresponsi- 
 bility. 
 
 The average youth takes kindly to the
 
 28 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 notion that in the first year or two at 
 college he need not be bound by the or- 
 dinary restraints of law-abiding men and 
 women. " Boys will be boys," even to 
 the extent of sowing wild oats. Time 
 enough to settle down by and by ; mean- 
 while the world is ours. A year or so 
 of lawlessness will be great fun, and will 
 give us large experience ; and even if 
 we shock some good people, we are but 
 doing the traditional thing. A youth 
 who feels thus takes prompt offence if 
 treated, as he says, " like a kid ; " yet he 
 may do things so low that any honest 
 child would despise them. Nor is this 
 true of one sex only. I have heard a mar- 
 ried woman recount with satisfaction her 
 two nights' work in stealing a sign when 
 she was at college ; and her father, a col- 
 lege man, listened with sympathetic joy. 
 I have known a youth who held a large 
 scholarship in money to steal, or as he 
 preferred to say "pinch," an instru- 
 ment worth several dollars from the lab-
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 29 
 
 oratory where he was trusted as he would 
 have been trusted in a gentleman's par- 
 lor. I have even heard of students who 
 bought signs, and hung them up in their 
 rooms to get the reputation of stealing 
 them. Surely there is nothing in college 
 life to make crime a joke. A street 
 "mucker" sneaks into a student's room 
 and steals half a dozen neckties (for 
 which the student has not paid), and 
 nothing is too hard for him ; a student 
 steals a poor laundryman's sign for fun : 
 may a gentleman do without censure 
 what sends a "mucker" to jail? If the 
 gentleman is locked up in the evening 
 to be taken before the judge in the morn- 
 ing, his friends are eager to get him out. 
 Yet in one night of ascetic meditation 
 he may learn more than in his whole 
 previous life of his relation to the rights 
 of his fellow men. One of the first les- 
 sons in college life is an axiom : Crime 
 is crime, and a thief is a thief, even at an 
 institution of learning. The college thief
 
 30 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 has, it is true, a different motive from his 
 less favored brother ; but is the motive 
 better ? Is there not at the root of it a 
 misunderstanding of one man's relation 
 to another, so selfish that, in those who 
 ought to be the flower of American 
 youth, it would be hardly conceivable if 
 we did not see it with our own eyes? 
 People sometimes wonder at the de- 
 sire of towns to tax colleges, instead 
 of helping them. A small number of 
 students who steal signs, and refuse to 
 pay bills unless the tradesman's man- 
 ner pleases them, may well account for 
 it all. 
 
 As there is nothing in college life to 
 justify a thief, so there is nothing in it 
 to justify a liar. College boys in their 
 relation to one another are quite as truth- 
 ful as other people ; but some of them 
 regard their dealings with college author- 
 ities as some men regard horse-trades. 
 We know them capable of distinguish- 
 ing truth from falsehood, since their
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 31 
 
 standard of integrity for their teachers 
 is sensitively high. Their standard for 
 themselves is part of that conceit, of 
 that blind incapacity for the Golden 
 Rule, which is often characteristic of 
 early manhood. To this blindness most 
 books about school and college life con- 
 tribute. Even the healthier of these 
 books stir the reader's sympathy in be- 
 half of the gentlemanly, happy-go-lucky 
 youth who pulls wool over the eyes of 
 his teachers, and deepen the impression 
 that college boys live in a fairyland of 
 charming foolery, and are no more mor- 
 ally responsible than the gods of Olym- 
 pus. Plainly such a theory of college 
 life, even if no one holds to it long, 
 nurses a selfishness and an insincerity 
 which may outlast the theory that has 
 nourished them. The man who has his 
 themes written for him, or who cribs at 
 examinations, or who excuses himself 
 from college lectures because of "sick- 
 ness " in order to rest after or before a
 
 32 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 dance, may be clever and funny to read 
 about ; but his cleverness and " funni- 
 ness" are not many degrees removed 
 from those of the forger and the im- 
 postor, who may also be amusing in 
 fiction. 
 
 Another bad thing in the substitution 
 of excuses, even fairly honest excuses, 
 for work is the weakening effect of it on 
 everyday life. The work of the world is 
 in large measure done by people whose 
 heads and throats and stomachs do not 
 feel just right, but who go about their 
 daily duties, and in doing them forget 
 their heads and throats and stomachs. 
 He who is to be "there" as a man can- 
 not afford to cosset himself as a boy. A 
 well-known railroad man has remarked 
 that he knows in his business two kinds 
 of men : one, with a given piece of work 
 to do before a given time, comes back at 
 the appointed hour and says, " That job 
 is done. I found unexpected difficulties, 
 but it is done ; " the other comes back
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 33 
 
 with "several excellent reasons" why 
 the job is not done. " I have," says the 
 railroad man, " no use for the second of 
 these men." Nor has any business man 
 use for him. The world is pretty cold 
 toward chronic invalids and excuse- 
 mongers. " If you are too sick to be 
 here regularly," it says, " I am sorry for 
 you, but I shall have to employ a health- 
 ier man." You will find, by the way, 
 that it is easier to attend all your re- 
 citations than to attend half or three- 
 quarters of them. Once open the ques- 
 tion of not going, and you see " several 
 excellent reasons " for staying at home. 
 Routine, as all mature men know, stead- 
 ies nerves, and, when used intelligently, 
 adds contentment to life. 
 
 I have spoken of lying to college offi- 
 cers, and of excuses which, if I may use 
 an undergraduate expression, " may be 
 right, but are not stylish right." I come 
 next to the question of responsibility to 
 father and mother in matters of truth and
 
 34 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 falsehood. One of the evils from vice of 
 all sorts at college is the lying that re- 
 sults from it. Shame and fear, half dis- 
 guised as a desire not to worry parents, 
 cut off many a father and mother from 
 knowing what they have a right to 
 know, and what they, if confided in, 
 might remedy. I have seldom seen a 
 student in serious trouble who did not 
 say honestly enough, I presume that 
 he cared less for his own mortification 
 than for his father's and mother's. As 
 a rule, one of his parents is threatened 
 with nervous prostration, or oppressed 
 with business cares, or has a weak heart 
 which, as the son argues, makes the 
 receipt of bad news dangerous. Filial 
 affection, which has been so dormant as 
 to let the student do those things which 
 would distress his parents most, awakes 
 instantly at the thought that the parents 
 must learn what he has done. The two 
 severest rebukes of a certain gentle mo- 
 ther were : " You ought to have meant
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 35 
 
 not to," and "You ought to have been 
 sorry beforehand." 
 
 Many a student, knowing that the 
 college must communicate with his fa- 
 ther, will not nerve himself to the duty 
 and the filial kindness of telling his fa- 
 ther first. I remember a boy who was to 
 be suspended for drunkenness, and who 
 was urged to break the news to his fa- 
 ther before the official letter went. 
 
 " You don't know my father," he said. 
 " My father is a very severe man, and I 
 can't tell him." 
 
 " The only thing you can do for him," 
 was the answer, " is to let him feel that 
 you are able and willing to tell him first, 
 that you give him your confidence." 
 
 " Oh, you don't know him," said the 
 boy again. 
 
 "Is there any 'out' about your father?" 
 
 " No " (indignantly) ! " You would 
 respect him and admire him ; but he 
 is a very severe man." 
 
 " Then he has a right to hear and
 
 36 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 to hear first from you. You cannot 
 help him more than by telling him, or 
 hurt him more than by hiding the truth 
 from him." 
 
 A day or two later the boy came back 
 to the college office. " My father is a 
 brick ! " he said. In his confession he had 
 learned for the first time how much his 
 father cared for him. 
 
 A young man, intensely curious about 
 the wickedness of life, is easily persuaded 
 that the first business of a college student 
 is " to know life," that is, to know the 
 worst things in it ; and, in the pursuit of 
 wisdom, he sets out in the evening, with 
 others, merely to see the vice of a great 
 city. He calls at a house where he meets 
 bad men and bad women, and eats and 
 drinks with them. What he eats and 
 drinks he does not know; but in the 
 morning he is still there, with a life stain 
 upon him, and needing more than ever 
 before to confide in father or mother or 
 in some good physician. Yet the people
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 37 
 
 who can help him most, the people also 
 in whom he must confide or be false to 
 them, are the very people he avoids. 
 
 Again, it is hard to prove by cold logic 
 that gambling is wrong. A young man 
 says to himself, " If I wish to spend a dol- 
 lar in this form of amusement, why should 
 I not ? I know perfectly well what I am 
 about I am playing with money not play- 
 ing for it. In some countries in Eng- 
 land, for example clergymen, and good 
 people generally, play whist with shilling 
 stakes, and would not think of playing it 
 without." So of vice he says, "No man 
 knows human nature until he has seen 
 the dark side. I shall be a broader man 
 if I know these things ; and some phy- 
 sicians recommend the practice of them 
 in moderation." When we say, " Lead 
 us not into temptation," we forget that 
 one of the worst temptations in the world 
 is the temptation to be led into tempta- 
 tion, the temptation to gratify vulgar 
 curiosity, and to see on what thin ice we
 
 38 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 can walk. No man is safe ; no man can 
 tell what he shall do, or what others will 
 do to him, if he once enters a gambling 
 house or a brothel. The history of every 
 city, and the history of every college, will 
 prove what I say. There is no wisdom 
 in looking at such places, nothing but 
 greenness and folly. The difficulty with 
 gambling is, as some one has said, that 
 " it eats the heart out of a man," that 
 imperceptibly the playing with slips into 
 the playing for, until without gambling 
 life seems tame : and the difficulty with 
 vice is that it involves physical danger 
 of the most revolting kind ; that it kills 
 self-respect ; that it brings with it either 
 shamelessness or a miserable dishonesty 
 for decency's sake ; and that it is a breach 
 of trust to those who are, or who are 
 to be, the nearest and the dearest, a 
 breach of trust to father and mother, and 
 to the wife and children, who may seem 
 remote and unreal, but who to most 
 young men are close at hand. By the
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 39 
 
 time a boy goes to college, he may well 
 feel responsibility to the girl whom some 
 day he will respect and love, and who, 
 he hopes, will respect and love him. A 
 boy's or man's sense of fair play should 
 show him that it is effrontery in a man 
 who has been guilty of vice with women 
 to ask for a pure girl's love. The time is 
 only too likely to come when a young 
 fellow who has yielded to the tremendous 
 sudden temptation that is thrown at him 
 in college and in the world, will face the 
 bitter question, " Can I tell the truth 
 about myself to the girl I love ? If I tell 
 it, I may justly lose her ; if I do not tell 
 it, my whole life may be a frightened lie." 
 
 "Who is the Happy Husband ? He 
 Who, scanning his unwedded life, 
 Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free, 
 'T was faithful to his future wife." 
 
 Not merely the curiosity which listens 
 to false arguments about life and wisdom, 
 but the awful loneliness of a boy far from 
 home, may lead to vice and misery. The
 
 40 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 boy who is used to girls at home, and 
 who knows in his new surroundings no 
 such girls as he knew at home, no such 
 girls as his sisters' friends, is only too 
 likely to scrape an easy acquaintance 
 with some of those inferior girls by whom 
 every student is seen in a kind of glamour, 
 and to whom acquaintance with students 
 is the chief excitement of life. With little 
 education, much giddy vanity, and no 
 refinement, these girls may yet possess a 
 sort of cheap attractiveness. They are, 
 besides, easy to get acquainted with, easy 
 to be familiar with, and interesting sim- 
 ply because they are girls for the time 
 being, the only accessible girls. I need 
 not dwell on the embarrassment, the sor- 
 row, and even the crime, in which such 
 friendships may end; but I may empha- 
 size the responsibility of every man, 
 young or old, towards every woman. 
 " Every free and generous spirit," said 
 Milton, "ought to be born a knight." 
 It is the part of a man to protect these
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 41 
 
 girls against themselves. If they know 
 no better than to hint to a student that 
 they should like to see his room some 
 evening, he knows better than to take 
 the hint, better than to suffer them 
 through him to do what, though it may 
 not stain their character, may yet de- 
 stroy their good name.. No girls stand 
 more in need of chivalry than these vain 
 girls, not yet bad, who flutter about the 
 precincts of a college. 
 
 Students know what responsibility 
 means ; but their views of it are dis- 
 torted. They demand it of their elders ; 
 in certain parts of athletics they demand 
 it of themselves. Which is the worse 
 breach of faith, to sit up a quarter of 
 an hour later than your athletic trainer 
 allows, or to betray the trust that father 
 and mother have put in you, to gamble 
 away or to spend on low women the 
 money sent you for your term-bill, and 
 to cover all with a lie ? 
 
 It may be from a dim notion of these
 
 42 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 eccentricities in undergraduate judgment 
 that many boys cultivate irresponsibility 
 with a view to social success. Social am- 
 bition is the strongest power in many a 
 student's college life, a power compared 
 with which all the rules and all the threats 
 of the Faculty, who blindly ignore it, are 
 impotent, a power that robs boys of their 
 independence, leading them to do things 
 foolish or worse and thereby to defeat 
 their own end. For in the long run, in 
 the later years of the college course, 
 the " not there " and the " there " can be 
 clearly distinguished. A student may be 
 poor, he may not play poker, he may not 
 drink, he may be free from all vice, he 
 may not even smoke ; and yet, if his 
 virtue is not showy, he will be popular 
 provided he " does something for his 
 class." "He is a bully fellow,"the students 
 say. " He is in training all the time." 
 
 I say little of responsibility to younger 
 students. An older student who misleads 
 a younger gets just about the name he
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 43 
 
 deserves. Even the Sophomore who se- 
 riously hazes a Freshman is now in the 
 better colleges recognized as a coward. 
 Cowardice once recognized, cannot long 
 prevail ; yet there was a time when it 
 took a deal of courage for a few young 
 men in one of our great colleges to stop 
 an outbreak of hazing. It took a deal 
 of courage ; but they did it. After all, 
 a student admires nothing so much as 
 " sand." What he needs is to see that 
 " sand " belongs not merely in war and 
 athletics, but in everyday life, and that 
 in everyday life " sand " may be accu- 
 mulated. A Harvard student, it is said, 
 was nearly dressed one morning and 
 was choosing a necktie, when his door, 
 which with the carelessness of youth he 
 had left unlocked, suddenly opened. A 
 woman entered, closed the door behind 
 her, put her back to it, and said, " I want 
 fifty dollars. If you don't give it to me, 
 I shall scream." The young man, still 
 examining his neckties, quietly replied,
 
 44 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 " You 'd better holler ; " and the woman 
 went out. Had he given her money, had 
 he even paid serious attention to her 
 threat, he might have been in her power 
 for life ; but his coolness saved him. An- 
 other undergraduate, who before coming 
 to college had worked as an engineer, 
 and who was a few years older than 
 most of his class, went one evening to 
 an officer of the college who knew some- 
 thing of him, and said, " I hardly know 
 just how I ought to speak to you ; but 
 in my building there is a Freshman who 
 is going to pieces, and a Senior who is 
 largely responsible for it." He then told 
 what he had seen, and gave the names 
 of both men. " If I look this up," said 
 the college officer, "are you willing to 
 appear in it? Are you willing to have 
 your name known ? " "I'd rather not 
 be ' queered,' " he answered ; " but if it 
 is necessary to be 'queered,' I will be." 
 All this happened in a college which 
 employs no spies and discourages tale-
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 45 
 
 bearing. For anything the student knew, 
 the officer himself might think him a 
 malicious informer. The " sand " in the 
 hero of the first of these little stories any 
 boy would see. To see the " sand " in 
 the hero of the second takes some ex- 
 perience ; but " sand," and " sand " of 
 the finest quality, was there. This man's 
 notion 'of the responsibility of older stu- 
 dents to younger ones had in it some- 
 thing positive. " You have no idea," 
 said a senator to Father Taylor, the 
 sailor preacher, who had rebuked him 
 for his vote, " You have no idea what the 
 outside pressure was." " Outside pres- 
 sure, Mr. Senator ! Outside pressure 1 
 Where were your inside braces?" To 
 run the risk of being thought a common 
 informer when you are not, and to run 
 it because you cannot let a man go under 
 without trying to pull him out, requires 
 such inside braces as few undergraduates 
 possess. 
 
 Let me say, however, that there is no
 
 46 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 better hope for Harvard College than in 
 the readiness of the strong to help the 
 weak. A youth is summoned to the col- 
 lege office, behindhand in his work, and 
 bad in his way of living. The Faculty 
 has done its best for him, and to no pur- 
 pose. A student of acknowledged stand- 
 ing in athletics and in personal charac- 
 ter appears at the office, and says, " I 
 should like to see whether I can make 
 that man work and keep him straight." 
 This, or something like this, occurs so 
 often that it is an important part of the 
 college life. Moreover, when the strong 
 man comes, he does not come with the 
 foolish notion that he shall help the weak 
 man in the eyes of the college office by 
 pretending that he is not weak. He takes 
 the case as it stands, knowing that his 
 own purpose and that of the college of- 
 fice are one and the same, to keep the 
 student, if he can be made into a man, 
 and otherwise in all kindness to send 
 him home.
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 47 
 
 One more responsibility needs men- 
 tioning here, responsibility to our 
 work. In college, it is said, a man of 
 fair capacity may do well one thing 
 beside his college work, and one thing 
 only. Those of us who are so fortunate 
 as to earn our own living must spend 
 most of our waking hours in work. It 
 follows that we must learn to enjoy work 
 or be unhappy. Now we learn to enjoy 
 work by working ; to get interested in 
 any task by doing it with all our strength. 
 This is the first lesson of scholarship : 
 without it we cannot be scholars ; and 
 only by courtesy can we be called stu- 
 dents. This is the first lesson of happy 
 activity in life. In athletics, in music, 
 in study, in business, we "train" our- 
 selves toward the free exercise of our 
 best powers, toward the joy that comes of 
 mastery. A college oarsman once de- 
 clared that after a season on the slides he 
 felt able to undertake anything. The in- 
 tellectual interests of a modern university
 
 48 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 are bewildering and intense. Among 
 them every intelligent youth can find 
 something worthy of his best labors, 
 something in which his best labors will 
 yield enjoyment beyond price. Right- 
 minded students see the noble oppor- 
 tunity in a college life ; and there is no 
 sadder sight than the blindness of those 
 who do not see it until it is lost for- 
 ever. 
 
 While speaking of the intellectual 
 side of college life, I may warn students 
 against becoming specialists too early. 
 Every study has some connection with 
 every other and gets some light from 
 it ; but a specialty, seriously undertaken, 
 compels a close study of itself, and may 
 leave little time for other study. An un- 
 enlightened specialist is a narrow being ; 
 and he who becomes an exclusive spe- 
 cialist before he has been in college two 
 years is usually unenlightened. Even 
 after the choice of a specialty, a stu- 
 dent, like a professional man, may wisely
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 49 
 
 reserve one corner of his mind for some- 
 thing totally different from his specialty, 
 and may find in that little corner a relief 
 which makes him a better specialist. It 
 is good for a man buried in a chemical 
 laboratory to take a course in English 
 poetry; it is good for a man steeped 
 in literature to have a mild infusion of 
 chemistry. 
 
 The lazy student (if I may return to 
 him now) finds the thread of his study 
 broken by his frequent absences from 
 the lecture room, and finds the lecture 
 hour a long, dull period of hard seats and 
 wandering thoughts. Note-taking would 
 shorten the hour, soften the seats, sim- 
 plify the subject, and make the whole 
 situation vastly more interesting. No 
 matter if some clever students are willing 
 to sell him notes, and he has no scruples 
 about buying them ; the mere process 
 of note-taking, apart from the education 
 and training in it, gives him something 
 to do in the lecture room, makes it im-
 
 50 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 possible for him not to know something" 
 of the subject, and shortens his period 
 of cramming for examination. I believe, 
 further, that a student's happiness is in- 
 creased by a time-table of regular hours 
 for work in each study. The prepara- 
 tion of theses, and the necessity of using 
 library books when other people are not 
 using them, make it hard now and then 
 to follow a time-table strictly ; but in gen- 
 eral such a table is a wonderful saver of 
 time. If a student leaves one lecture 
 room at ten and goes to another at twelve 
 and has no idea what he wishes to do 
 between ten and twelve, he is likely to 
 do nothing. Even if he has determined 
 to study, he loses time in getting under 
 way in deciding what to study. Work 
 with a time-table tends to promptness in 
 transition ; and when the time-table for 
 the day is carried out, the free hours are 
 truly free, a time of clear and well-earned 
 recreation. At school the morning rou- 
 tine is prescribed by the teacher. At col-
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 51 
 
 lege, where it should be prescribed by 
 the student, it frequently breaks down. 
 A man's freedom, as viewed with a boy's 
 eyes, is liberty to waste time : it is the 
 luxury of spending the best morning 
 hours in a billiard room, or loafing in a 
 classmate's " study ; " the joy of hearing 
 the bell ring and ring for you, while you 
 sit high above the slaves of toil and puff 
 the smoke of cigarettes with the superb 
 indifference of a small cloud-compelling 
 Zeus. The peculiar evil in cigarettes 
 I leave for scientific men to explain ; I 
 know merely that among college stu- 
 dents the excessive cigarette smokers are 
 recognized even by other smokers as re- 
 presenting the feeblest form of intellec- 
 tual and moral life. At their worst they 
 have no backbone ; they cannot tell (and 
 possibly cannot see) the truth ; and they 
 loaf. Senator Hoar, in an address to 
 Harvard students, remarked that in his 
 judgment the men who succeed best in 
 life are the men who have made the best
 
 52 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 use of the odd moments at college, and 
 that, contrary to the general opinion, it is 
 worse to loaf in college than to loaf in a 
 professional school. The young lawyer, 
 he observed, who has neglected the law 
 may make up his deficiencies in the 
 early years of his practice ; "he will 
 have plenty of time then : " but there is 
 no recovery of the years thrown away at 
 college. 
 
 Once more, if we could only teach by 
 the experience of others, we should save 
 untold misery. I met not long since a 
 young business man who had been for 
 four years on and off probation in Har- 
 vard College and had not yet received his 
 degree. In college he had seemed dull. 
 He probably thought he worked, because 
 his life was broken into, more or less, by 
 college exercises, which he attended with 
 some regularity. Now he is really work- 
 ing, with no time to make up college defi- 
 ciencies, ready to admit that in college 
 he hardly knew the meaning of work,
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 53 
 
 and to say simply and spontaneously, "I 
 made a fool of myself in college." An- 
 other student, who did nothing in his 
 studies, who spent four or five thousand 
 dollars a year, and who constantly hired 
 tutors to do his thinking, was finally 
 expelled because he got a substitute to 
 write an examination for him. Home 
 trouble followed college trouble ; he was 
 thrown on himself and into the cold 
 world ; and he became a man. From 
 scrubbing street cars, he was promoted 
 to running them ; from running them to 
 holding a place of trust with men to do 
 his orders. " Every day," he said, " I 
 feel the need of what I threw away at 
 college. Do you think if I came back I 
 should need any more tutors ? I 'd go 
 through quicker than anything, with no- 
 body to help me. What sent me away 
 was the one dishonest thing in my life." 
 The dishonest thing came about through 
 loafing. 
 
 Even socially, as I have intimated, the
 
 54 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 loafer seldom or never wins the highest 
 college success. Graduating classes be- 
 stow their honors on men who have 
 " done something," athletics, college 
 journalism, debating, if you will, not 
 necessarily hard study in the college 
 course, but hard and devoted work in 
 something, and work with an unselfish 
 desire to help the college and the class. 
 At Harvard College in the class of 1899 
 all three marshals graduated with dis- 
 tinction in their studies. By the begin- 
 ning of the Senior year the class knows 
 the men to be relied on, the men who 
 are "there," and knows that they are 
 men of active life. 
 
 I have spoken earlier of a student's 
 responsibility to some unknown girl who 
 is to be his wife. What is his respon- 
 sibility to a known girl with whom 
 in college days he falls in love? Just 
 as college Faculties are blind to the ef- 
 fect of social ambition in students, they 
 are blind to the effect of sweethearts. I
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 55 
 
 do not quite know what they could do 
 if their eyes were opened ; for college 
 rules, happily, must be independent 
 of sweethearts. I mean merely that 
 scores of cases in which students break 
 rules, " cut " lectures, disappear for a 
 day or two without permission, and 
 do other things that look rebellious, 
 are readily accounted for by the disqui- 
 eting influence of girls. What students 
 do (or don't) when they are in love is 
 a pretty good test of their character. 
 One drops his work altogether, and de- 
 votes what time he cannot spend with 
 the girl to meditating upon her. He can 
 think of nothing else ; and accordingly 
 for her sake he becomes useless. Another 
 sets his teeth, and works hard. " She is," 
 he says naturally enough, "infinitely 
 above me. How She ever can care for 
 me, I do not know ; whether She ever 
 will, I do not know ; but I will be what 
 I can and do what I can. I will do what- 
 ever I do as if I were doing it for Her.
 
 y 
 
 56 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 I am doing it for Her. If I succeed, it 
 will be through Her ; if my success pleases 
 Her, I shall be repaid." 
 
 No girl worth having will think better 
 of a man for shirking his plain duty in 
 order to hang about her. No girl likes 
 a " quitter ; " and most girls agree with 
 the heroine of Mr. Kipling's beautiful 
 story, "William the Conqueror," when 
 she says, " I like men who do things." 
 The story shows with profound and ex- 
 quisite truth how two persons of strong 
 character may grow into each other's 
 love and into an understanding of it by 
 doing their separate duties. To go on, 
 girl or no girl, without excuses small or 
 great ; to do the appointed task and to 
 do it cheerfully amid all distractions, all 
 sorrows, all heartaches ; to make routine 
 (not blind but enlightened routine) your 
 friend thus it is that by and by when 
 you meet the hard blows of the world 
 you can 
 
 " Go labor on ; spend and be spent."
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 57 
 
 Thus it is that you find the strength 
 which is born of trained capacity for in- 
 terest in daily duty. 
 
 On the banks of the Connecticut is a 
 school without a loafer in it. The schol- 
 ars are needy for the most part, and so 
 grimly in earnest that only a printed 
 regulation restrains them from getting 
 up " before 5 A. M." without permission. 
 I am far from recommending study be- 
 fore breakfast, or loss of the night's sleep ; 
 but I admire the whole-hearted energy 
 with which these boys and grown men 
 seize the opportunity of their lives. I 
 admire the same energy in athletics, if a 
 student will only remember that his ath- 
 letics are for his college, not his college 
 for his athletics. 
 
 One more caution for college life and 
 for after life. Do not let your ideals get 
 shopworn. Keep the glory of your youth. 
 A man with no visions, be he young or 
 old, is a poor thing. There is no place 
 like a college for visions and ideals ; and
 
 5 8 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 it is through our visions, through our 
 ideals, that we keep high our standard 
 of character and life. No man's charac- 
 ter is fixed ; and no responsible man is 
 overconfident of his own. It is the part 
 of every boy when he arrives at man- 
 hood to recognize as one of his greatest 
 dangers the fading of the vision, and to 
 set himself against this danger with all 
 his might. It is only the man with ideals 
 who is founded on a rock, and resists the 
 rains and the floods. 
 
 A vigorous young fellow, fresh from 
 college, went into a business house at 
 four dollars a week, and rapidly rose 
 to a well-paid and responsible position. 
 One day he received from a member of 
 the firm an order to do something that 
 he thought dishonorable. He showed 
 the order to the member of the firm 
 whom he knew best, and asked him 
 what he thought of it. 
 
 "Come and dine with me," said his 
 patron, " and we will talk it over."
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 59 
 
 " Excuse me," said the young man. 
 "Any other day I should be glad to 
 dine with you ; but this matter is busi- 
 ness." 
 
 " Look ! " said the other. " Business 
 is war ; and if you do not do these things 
 in business, you can't live." 
 
 " I don't believe it," said the young 
 man. " If I did, I should n't be here. I 
 leave your employ Saturday night ; " 
 and, to the amazement of the firm, he 
 left it forever. 
 
 "And virtue's whole sum is but know and dare," 
 
 said a great poet in one of his great- 
 est moments. It takes a man with ideals 
 to begin all over again, abandoning the 
 kind of work in which he has won con- 
 spicuous success, and abandoning it be- 
 cause he finds that its methods, though 
 accepted by business men generally, are 
 for him dishonorable. 
 
 In and out of college the man with 
 ideals helps, so far as in him lies, his
 
 60 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 college and his country. It is hard for a 
 boy to understand that in life, whatever 
 he does, he helps to make or mar the name 
 of his college. I have said " in life " I 
 may say also " in death." Not long since, 
 I saw a Harvard Senior on what proved 
 to be his death-bed. The people at the 
 hospital declared that they had never 
 seen such pain borne with such fortitude, 
 " and," said the Medical Visitor of the 
 University, " he was through it all such 
 a gentleman." A day or two before his 
 death an attendant asked him whether 
 he felt some local pain. " I did not," said 
 he, "until you gave me that medicine." 
 Then instantly he added, miserably weak 
 and suffering as he was, " I beg your 
 pardon. You know and I don't. It may 
 be the medicine had nothing to do with 
 my pain." I believe no man or woman 
 in the ward saw that boy die without 
 seeing also a new meaning and a new 
 beauty in the college whose name he 
 bore. As has often been said, the youth
 
 COLLEGE LIFE 61 
 
 who loves his Alma Mater will always 
 ask, not " What can she do for me ?" but 
 " What can I do for her ? " 
 
 Responsibility is first, last, and al- 
 ways the burden of my song, a stu- 
 dent's responsibility to home, to fellow 
 students, to school, to college, and (let 
 me add once more) to the girl whom he 
 will ask some day to be his wife. " Moral 
 taste," as Miss Austen calls it, is no- 
 thing without moral force. " If," said a 
 college President to a Freshman class, 
 " you so live that in a few years you will 
 be a fit companion for an intellectual, 
 high-minded, pure-hearted woman, you 
 will not go far wrong." Keep her in 
 mind always, or, if you are not imagina- 
 tive enough for that, remember that the 
 lines 
 
 " No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
 As I have seen in one autumnal face " 
 
 were written of a good man's mother.
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 To an American college the word of 
 all words is " truth." " Veritas " is the 
 motto of Harvard; "Lux et Veritas" 
 the motto of Yale. On one of the new 
 Harvard gates is inscribed the com- 
 mand from the song in Isaiah, " Open 
 ye the gates, that the righteous nation 
 which keepeth the truth may enter in ; "' 
 and no better text can be found for the 
 sons of our universities than " Ye shall 
 know the truth, and the truth shall make 
 you free." To guard the truth and to 
 proclaim the truth are duties which the 
 better colleges have, on the whole, hon- 
 estly performed. Now and then, in the 
 fancied opposition of religion and science, 
 a college has preferred to guard what it 
 believes to be one kind of truth rather
 
 64 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 i 
 
 than to proclaim another. " This is not 
 a comfortable place to teach science in," 
 said a young geologist who had gone 
 from Harvard to a university in the 
 West. " The President says, ' If any- 
 body asks questions about the antiquity 
 of the earth, send him to me.' " Yet, in 
 our older and stronger colleges at any 
 rate, fearless investigation and free and 
 fearless speech are the rule, even at the 
 sacrifice of popularity and of money. 
 
 Now, whether truth be truth of re- 
 ligion, or of science, or of commerce, 
 or of intercourse among fellow men, a 
 college to stand for it must believe in it 
 As an institution of learning, a college 
 must be an institution of truth ; as a 
 school of character, it must be a school 
 of integrity. It can have no other justi- 
 fication. Yet, outside of politicians and 
 horse-traders, no men are more commonly 
 charged with disingenuousness than col- 
 lege presidents ; and in no respectable 
 community are certain kinds of dishon-
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 65 
 
 esty more readily condoned than among 
 college students. The relation of college 
 to college, whether in a conference of 
 professors or in a contest of athletes, is 
 too often a relation of suspicion, if not 
 of charge and countercharge. Intercol- 
 legiate discussion of admission require- 
 ments may have an atmosphere, not 
 of common interest in education, but of 
 rivalry in intercollegiate politics ; and, 
 as everybody knows, a discussion of 
 athletics at one college frequently shows 
 an almost complete want of confidence 
 in the honesty of athletics at another. 
 Yet every college would maintain stead- 
 ily, and nearly every college would main- 
 tain honestly, that it stands for the truth. 
 When I speak of a college as believ- 
 ing in the truth, I mean first that its 
 President and Faculty must be honest 
 and fearless ; but I mean more than this. 
 I mean also that a high standard of honor 
 must be maintained by its undergradu- 
 ates ; for, far beyond the belief of most
 
 66 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 men, the standing of a college in the 
 community and the effect of a college 
 in the country depend on the personal 
 character of the undergraduates. This 
 personal character depends in a measure 
 on the straightforwardness and the hu- 
 man quality of the college teachers ; but 
 what Cardinal Newman says of intel- 
 lectual development in the university is 
 equally true of moral development : 
 
 " When a multitude of young men, 
 keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and ob- 
 servant, as young men are, come to- 
 gether and freely mix with each other, 
 they are sure to learn one from an- 
 other, even if there be no one to teach 
 them ; the conversation of all is a series 
 of lectures to each, and they gain for 
 themselves new ideas and views, fresh 
 matter of thought, and distinct principles 
 for judging and acting day by day. 
 
 " I am but saying that that youthful 
 community will constitute a whole, it
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 67 
 
 will embody a specific idea, it will re- 
 present a doctrine, it will administer a 
 code of conduct, and it will furnish prin- 
 ciples of thought and action. It will 
 give birth to a living teaching, which in 
 the course of time will take the shape of 
 a self-perpetuating tradition, or a genius 
 loci, as it is sometimes called; which 
 haunts the home where it has been born, 
 and which imbues and forms, more or 
 less, and one by one, every individual 
 who is successively brought under its 
 shadow. Thus it is that, independent 
 of direct instruction on the part of su- 
 periors, there is a sort of self-education 
 in the academic institutions of Protes- 
 tant England ; a characteristic tone of 
 thought, a recognized standard of judg- 
 ment, is found in them, which, as de- 
 veloped in the individual who is submit- 
 ted to it, becomes a twofold source of 
 strength to him, both from the distinct 
 stamp it impresses on his mind, and from 
 the bond of union which it creates be-
 
 68 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 tween him and others, effects which 
 are shared by the authorities of the place, 
 for they themselves have been educated 
 in it, and at all times are exposed to the 
 influence of its ethical atmosphere." 
 
 In any community the students of a 
 college make a tremendous power for 
 good or evil ; and by them in college, 
 and by them after they have left college, 
 their college shall be judged. If, as 
 Cardinal Newman puts it, the practical 
 end of a university course is " training 
 good members of society " (and, I may 
 add, training leaders of men), nothing 
 can be of more importance in a univer- 
 sity, and scarcely anything can be of 
 more importance in a community, than 
 the attitude of undergraduates in ques- 
 tions of truth and falsehood. 
 
 Those who constantly inspect this at- 
 titude find much to encourage them. 
 The undergraduate standard of honor for 
 college officers is so sensitively high that 
 no one need despair of the students'
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 69 
 
 ethical intelligence. No doubt, disin- 
 genuousness is sometimes believed of the 
 wrong man ; the upright professor with 
 a reserved or forbidding manner may 
 get a name for untrustworthiness, while 
 the honor of his less responsible but 
 more genial colleague is unquestioned : 
 yet the blindness here is the blindness of 
 youthful prejudice. The nature of dis- 
 ingenuousness is seen clearly enough ; 
 and the recognition of it in an instructor 
 condemns him for all time. There is 
 indeed but one way in which a man' with- 
 out extraordinary personal charm may 
 gain and keep the confidence of students: 
 by scrupulous openness in all his deal- 
 ings with them, great or small. A mo- 
 ment's forgetfulness, a moment's evasive- 
 ness, even a moment's appearance of 
 evasiveness, may crack the thin ice 
 on which every college officer is skating 
 as best he can ; and the necessity of 
 keeping the secrets of less scrupulous 
 persons may break it through. In some
 
 70 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 ways all this is healthy. A young fel- 
 low who sees a high standard of truth 
 for anybody's conduct may in time see 
 it for his own. All he needs is to dis- 
 cover that the world was not made for 
 him only; and a year or two out of 
 college should teach him that. What 
 he lacks is not principle, but experience 
 and readjustment. This is the lack in 
 the average undergraduate. It is only 
 a highly exceptional student who speaks 
 frankly to all (college officers included) 
 of the lies he has told in tight places, 
 and who seems never to question an 
 implied premise that in tight places all 
 men lie. 
 
 Another healthy sign is the high stan- 
 dard of honor in athletic training. This 
 standard, indeed, may be cruelly high. 
 The slightest breach of training con- 
 demns a student in the eyes of a whole 
 college, and is almost impossible to live 
 down. Still another healthy sign is the 
 character of the men whom, in our best
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 71 
 
 colleges, the undergraduates instinctively 
 choose as class presidents, as athletic cap- 
 tains, and in general as leaders. Grown 
 men, electing a President of the United 
 States for four years, are not always so 
 fortunate as Harvard Freshmen, who 
 after eight or ten weeks of college expe- 
 rience choose one of their own number 
 for an office which he is practically sure 
 to hold throughout the four college 
 years. 1 With few exceptions, our un- 
 dergraduate leaders are straightforward, 
 manly fellows, who will join college 
 officers in any honest partnership for 
 the good of one student or of all, and 
 who shrink from any kind of meanness. 
 \Vant of a fine sense of honor appears 
 chiefly in athletic contests, in the author- 
 ship of written work, in excuses for neg- 
 lect of study, in the relation of students 
 to the rights of persons who are not stu- 
 
 1 Class presidents are usually football players ; 
 and, as a student once observed, " When a feller 
 plays football, it doesn't take long to find out what 
 Jkind of a feller he is."
 
 72 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 dents, and in questions of duty to all who 
 are, or who are to be, nearest and dear- 
 est. Here are the discouraging signs; 
 but even these are a part of that lop- 
 sided immaturity which characterizes 
 privileged youth. It is natural, as has 
 been said, for boys to grow like colts, 
 one end at a time. The pity is that the 
 boy, who determines in a measure his 
 own growth, should be so late in devel- 
 oping the power to put himself into 
 another's place ; that the best education 
 which the country can proffer is so slow 
 in teaching to the chosen youth of the 
 nation the Golden Rule, or even that part 
 of the Golden Rule which results in 
 common honesty; that the average col- 
 lege boy, frank and manly as he is, is 
 honest in spots, and shows in his honesty 
 little sense of proportion. 
 
 Take, for instance, that part of college 
 life into which the average boy throws 
 himself with most enthusiasm, athletic 
 sport, and see how far our students
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 73 
 
 have fallen below the ideal of honesty, 
 how far they still remain from a clear 
 sense of proportion. I recognize the 
 place of strategy in athletics ; and I by 
 no means agree with the gentleman who 
 stigmatized a college catcher as " up to 
 all the professional tricks " because *' he 
 made a feint of throwing the ball in one 
 direction, and then threw it in another : " 
 yet the necessity of trusting a game to 
 what the umpire sees is deplorable. A 
 whole-souled and straightforward young 
 athlete told me once, with smiling good 
 humor, that a football player in his own 
 college (who had everybody's respect) 
 owed his success in the game to a knack 
 of holding his opponent in such a man- 
 ner as made his opponent seem to hold 
 him. Few college catchers, I suspect, 
 systematically resist the temptation of 
 pulling down a " ball " to make it look 
 like a " strike ; " and many cultivate 
 skill in this sleight of hand as a cardinal 
 point in the game. Even players who
 
 74 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 trip others, though in public they may 
 be hissed, and in private talked about 
 as "muckers," are likely to remain in 
 the team, and in some colleges may 
 become captains (whereas a Freshman 
 who breaks training by smoking a sin- 
 gle cigarette may be " queered " for his 
 whole college course). Many ball play- 
 ers use their tongues to confound or ex- 
 cite their adversaries ; and whole armies 
 of students, supported by a well-mean- 
 ing college press, make a business of 
 " rattling " a rival team by what ought 
 to be an inspiration, and not a weapon, 
 defensive or offensive, organized cheer- 
 ing. The youth who plays a clean game 
 is admired, but not always followed: 
 and the doctrine of Mr. Henry L. Hig- 
 ginson and Mr. R. C. Lehmann, that a 
 clean game comes first, and winning 
 comes second, though it strikes under- 
 graduates as faultless in theory and as 
 endearing in the men who preach it, is 
 not always suffered, in a hard game, to
 
 COLLEGE HONOR ] 7* 
 
 interfere with "practical baseball" or 
 " practical football," expressions used 
 among undergraduates much as " prac- 
 tical politics " is used among men of the 
 world. 
 
 College dishonesty in written work is 
 hard to eradicate, because rooted in im- 
 palpable tradition, that damaging tra- 
 dition which exempts students from the 
 ordinary rules of right living, and re- 
 gards as venial, or even as humorous, 
 acts intrinsically allied to those of the 
 impostor, the forger, and the thief. It 
 is incredible that a youth of eighteen 
 should not see the dishonesty of hand- 
 ing in as his own work, for his own 
 credit, a piece of writing which he has 
 copied from a newspaper or from a 
 book, or from the writing of a fellow 
 student, or which he has paid another 
 man to write for him. Nobody who 
 can get into college is so stupid that he 
 cannot see the lie involved. Everybody 
 sees it clearly if the writing is for a
 
 76 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 prize, and if the fraud deprives a fellow 
 student of his fair chance ; but if a youth 
 has spent all his available time in ath- 
 letics, or in billiards, or at clubs, or at 
 dances, or at the theatre, and if a thesis 
 is due the next day, what is he to do ? 
 "A man must live," is a common cry 
 of dishonest persons out of college; and 
 " A man must get through," is a suffi- 
 cient excuse for the dishonesty of stu- 
 dents. In talking with these dishonest 
 students, I have been struck by two 
 things : first, by their apparent inability 
 to see that nobody ever has to hand in 
 anything, and that handing in nothing 
 is infinitely better than handing in a dis- 
 honest thing; next, by their feeling that 
 their own cases are exceptional, since 
 the wrong was done " under pressure," 
 as if pressure did not account for the 
 offences of all amateur liars and forgers. 
 In many students, also, there remains 
 a trace of the old feeling that to cheat 
 is one thing, and to cheat a teacher is
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 77 
 
 another. Here is where generations of 
 tricky schoolboys have established a 
 practice as hard to overthrow by logic 
 as love of country or love of liquor, 
 or anything else, good or bad, which de- 
 pends on custom and feeling rather than 
 on reason. We may prove that it is 
 not honest to call a man we hate " Dear 
 Sir," or to call ourselves his " very truly; " 
 but custom sanctions it, and he expects 
 nothing better (or worse). We know 
 that killing harmless animals beyond 
 what can be used as food is wanton de- 
 struction of life precious to its posses- 
 sors ; but good people go on fishing and 
 shooting. Just so, if there is a tradition 
 that teachers are fair game, and if the 
 leaders among boys so regard them, 
 there is no social ostracism for dishon- 
 esty in written work. Dishonest boys 
 admit that an instructor who should 
 print as his own what his pupils after- 
 wards discovered in an earlier publica- 
 tion by another author would be de-
 
 /3 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 spised forever. Here, as elsewhere, the 
 students' standard for the Faculty is 
 faultlessly high ; here, as elsewhere, what 
 they need is to open their eyes to their 
 own relative position among men, to 
 see that, if people who cheat them are 
 liars, they themselves, whatever their 
 social self-complacency, are liars also if 
 they cheat other people. I would not 
 give the impression that most students 
 cheat or fail to condemn cheating, or that 
 colleges are not making steady progress 
 toward a higher sense of honor in this 
 matter which would be clear to a right- 
 minded child of ten. I mean merely 
 that, whereas outside of college (and the 
 custom house) the act of obvious dis- 
 honesty commonly puts the man into 
 bad repute, among undergraduates the 
 man often brings the act into better 
 repute by elevating it socially ; and that 
 this is a disgrace to an institution which 
 counts as its members the chosen youth 
 of an enlightened country. In this mat-
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 79 
 
 ter, it is encouraging to note the feeling 
 of the better students in Mr. Flandrau's 
 clever Diary of a Freshman; yet even 
 there the offence carries with it little or 
 nothing of social condemnation. It is 
 encouraging, also, to note the success of 
 the so-called " honor system " in schools 
 and colleges which have adopted it, and 
 the ostracism of those students who have 
 proved false to it. For myself, I cannot 
 see why a proctor in the examination 
 room is more than a reasonable safe- 
 guard, or why his presence there should 
 be more offensive than that of a police- 
 man in the street, to a student honest 
 and mature. It is only boys (whatever 
 their age) who take umbrage when a man 
 counts their change, or verifies their 
 assertions, or audits their accounts, or 
 refuses without security to cash their 
 checks, or refuses to please them by tes- 
 tifying to what he does not know. You 
 may believe in a boy through and 
 through, and by showing your belief in
 
 8o COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 him you may help him to be honest; 
 but your belief in him does not warrant 
 your official testimony that he has suc- 
 cessfully completed a certain work, if 
 you have no evidence but his own de- 
 claration and the silence of his fellows. 
 Moreover, so far as my experience goes, 
 the hotbeds of college cheating are 
 not the important examinations superin- 
 tended by proctors ; they are written 
 " quizzes " in the crowded classroom, or 
 themes, theses, forensics, compositions in 
 foreign languages, mathematical prob- 
 lems, any kind of written work done 
 out of the classroom ; and in all these 
 latter cases the students, whether they 
 know it or not, are "put on their honor." 
 Theoretically, though in a doubtful casr 
 I should always accept the word of a 
 suspected student, I object to the honor 
 system as nursing a false sensitiveness 
 that resents a kind of supervision which 
 everybody must sooner or later accept, 
 and as taking from the degree some part
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 81 
 
 of its sanction. If a student vouches 
 for his own examinations, why, it has 
 been asked, should he not sign his own 
 diploma, and stand on his honor before 
 the world as he has stood on it before 
 the Faculty *? Yet, practically, I am 
 told, the honor system bids fair, where 
 it has been adopted, " to revolutionize 
 the whole spirit of undergraduate inter- 
 course with the Faculty." It is, at any 
 rate, as one of my correspondents says, 
 a " systematic endeavor by undergradu- 
 ates themselves to establish a much bet- 
 ter moral code in relation to written 
 work," and is therefore "an immense 
 moral gain in itself." Besides, I have 
 yet to meet a single man who has lived 
 under the honor system (as I have not) 
 who does not give it, in spite, perhaps, 
 of a priori scepticism, his absolute faith. 
 Sound or unsound, the honor system has 
 in it signs of hope. 
 
 The notion that makeshifts and ex^ 
 cuses in place of attendance and work
 
 82 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 are different at college from what they 
 are elsewhere is another aspect of the 
 tradition to which I have referred. Able- 
 bodied youths are afflicted with diseases 
 that admit all pleasures and forbid all 
 duties, and if questioned closely are of- 
 fended because their word is not accepted 
 promptly and in full, even when it is 
 obviously of little worth. The dissipa- 
 tion of a night brings the headache of a 
 morning; and the student excuses him- 
 self as too sick for college work. On 
 the day before a ball and on the day 
 after it, a severe cold prevents a student 
 from attendance at college exercises ; but 
 he goes to the ball. Many undergrad- 
 uates treat their academic engagements 
 in a way that would lose them positions 
 at any business house inside of a week ; 
 yet no remorse affects their appetites or 
 their sleep. In this world, by the way, 
 it is not the just who sleep; it is the 
 irresponsible. 
 
 The openness with which these worth-
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 83 
 
 less excuses are offered is a sign that the 
 trouble is perverted vision rather than 
 radical moral obliquity. An ingenuous 
 youth, prevented by a cold from going 
 to college exercises, stood on a windy 
 ball field one raw day in the spring, and, 
 unabashed, coached his men before the 
 eyes of the officer whose business it was 
 to call him to account. Another insisted 
 to the same officer that a mark of absence 
 against him in a large lecture course was 
 a mistake; and when told that it was 
 not, exclaimed with honest warmth, 
 " Then the fellow who promised to sit 
 in my seat did n't do it ! " Both of these 
 boys were blinded by the tradition which 
 nearly all college literature has fostered, 
 and which nothing but eternal vigilance 
 and constant and prolonged care can de- 
 stroy. It is this tradition which led a 
 professor to say, " Students who won't 
 lie to an individual will lie to the college 
 office ; it is a soulless, impersonal thing." 
 Another aspect of this same compre-
 
 84 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 hensive tradition is the enthusiasm of 
 some Freshmen for stealing signs. There 
 was, indeed, a time when timid Fresh- 
 men bought signs, to have the reputation 
 of "ragging" them. The word "rag," 
 as I have said elsewhere, is more local, 
 more specific, and, when applied to our 
 own acts or to those of our friends, less 
 embarrassing than the word " steal." No 
 doubt the college stealer of signs, whether 
 youth or maiden, steals for fun, and has 
 not the same motive as the common 
 thief; yet the motive, as I see it, is no 
 higher. The implied general proposition 
 at the root of the act is the proposition 
 that students' privileges include the privi- 
 lege of disregarding the rights of others ; 
 the assumption that the world, of which 
 so much is bestowed on them, is theirs, 
 to disport themselves in. Sometimes 
 the stealing takes the form of destroying 
 property (breaking glass, for instance) ; 
 sometimes of robbing the very mother 
 who shelters the robber. "Do you re-
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 85 
 
 member what fun we had burning that 
 pile of lumber in front of Matthews 
 Hall ? " said a middle-aged clergyman 
 to a classmate. Yet Matthews Hall was 
 a generous gift to the University; and 
 the students who destroyed the lumber 
 were picking the pocket of a benefac- 
 tor or of the Alma Mater herself. De- 
 struction of property is often an attempt 
 to celebrate athletic success ; it is, if the 
 phrase is pardonable, an ebullition of 
 misfit loyalty to the college whose pro- 
 perty is sacrificed, as if the son of a 
 successful candidate for the presidency 
 of the United States should celebrate his 
 father's victory by burning down his fa- 
 ther's house. Sometimes undergraduates 
 " pinch " bits of college property as tro- 
 phies, just as modern pilgrims have 
 shown their respect for the Pilgrim Fa- 
 thers by chipping off pieces of Plymouth 
 Rock. These kinds of college dishon- 
 esty are happily lessening, and are re- 
 garded as pardonable in Freshmen only,
 
 86 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 as evidence of " freshness " pure and 
 simple. That they exist at all is not 
 merely a scandal to the good name of 
 the college, but a menace to its prosper- 
 ity. The few foolish boys who are guilty 
 of them stand in the unthinking public 
 mind for the noble universities which 
 they misrepresent, until irritated trades- 
 men and city governments forget what 
 the college does for the community, and 
 view it merely as a rich corporation that 
 escapes taxes and fills the city with inso- 
 lent and dishonest youth. The irrespon- 
 sibility of some students in money mat- 
 ters, their high-minded indignation if a 
 tradesman to whom they have owed 
 money for years demands it in a manner 
 that does not meet their fancy, increases 
 the irritation; and incalculable damage 
 is done. 
 
 After all, the most serious aspect of 
 college dishonesty is the dishonesty of 
 vice. Many persons who condemn vice 
 believe nevertheless that it belongs with
 
 COLLEGE HONOR ] 87 
 
 a character which, though its strength is 
 perverted, is open and hearty ; and now 
 and then this belief seems justified: but 
 those who see at close range the effects 
 of vice remember that bound up with 
 most of it is, and must be, faithlessness 
 to father and mother, and to the wife 
 and children who are soon to be. College 
 sentiment condemns habitual vice. Like 
 the sentiment of the world at large, it is 
 lenient (to men only) in occasional lapses 
 from virtue, unless a lapse involves 
 a breach of athletic training. Here too 
 we mark that want of proportion which 
 characterizes undergraduate judgments 
 of college honor. The youth who squan- 
 ders in vice the money which his father, 
 at a sacrifice, has sent him for his term 
 bill may be a good fellow yet; the 
 youth who breaks training is a disgrace 
 to his Alma Mater. 
 
 In dwelling on certain kinds of col- 
 lege dishonesty, I have not forgotten that 
 in some respects the college sense of
 
 88 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 honor is the keenest in the community, 
 and that no higher ideal can be found on 
 earth than in the best thought of our 
 best universities. What I have pointed 
 out must be taken as stray survivals of 
 an intensely vital tradition, survivals 
 which in a democracy like our own have 
 no right to be. The public sentiment of 
 our colleges is becoming, year by year, 
 cleaner and clearer-sighted. We move 
 forward, and not slowly. What makes 
 some persons impatient is the need of 
 teaching to the picked young men of 
 America that a lie is a lie, whoever tells 
 it, and a theft a theft, whoever commits 
 it; and that a college student, though 
 he gains more blessings than his neigh- 
 bor, does not gain thereby the right to 
 appropriate his neighbor's goods. In our 
 impatience, we forget that to teach an 
 axiom takes years and generations if the 
 axiom contradicts tradition; and we for- 
 get that, when all is said, our under- 
 graduates themselves are constantly pu- 
 rifying and uplifting college honor.
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 THE older I grow, the more strongly I 
 feel that the best thing in man or wo- L/ 
 man is being " there" Physical bravery, 
 which is always inspiring, is surprisingly 
 common ; but the sure and steady quality 
 of being " there " belongs to compara- 
 tively few. This is why we hear on every 
 hand, " If you want a thing well done, 
 do it yourself; " not because the man who 
 wants it done is best able to do it, but 
 because to many persons it seems a hope- 
 less quest to look for any one who cares 
 enough for them, who can put himself 
 vigorously enough into their places, to 
 give them his best, to give them intelli- 
 gent, unremitting, loyal service until the 
 job is done, not half done, or nine
 
 90 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 tenths done, or ninety-nine hundredths 
 done, but done, with intelligence and de- 
 votion in every nail he drives, or every 
 comma he writes. Some are reluctant, 
 some afraid of doing more than they are 
 paid for, some indifferent, some obli- 
 gingly helpful but not well trained and 
 not so deeply devoted as to train them- 
 selves. I suppose that in one sphere of 
 life or another a number of these persons 
 earn what they get. Yet sometimes I 
 think there are only two kinds of ser- 
 vice, that which is not worth having 
 at any price, and that for which no 
 money can pay. All of us know a few 
 who give this latter kind of service, and 
 know what they are to us, and to every 
 one with whom they deal. These are 
 the people who are " there." 
 
 Now being "there" is the result of 
 three things, intelligence, constant 
 practice, and something hard to define 
 but not too fancifully called an ideal. Of 
 intelligence everybody can see the need ;
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 91 
 
 but not everybody knows how little 
 quickness of mind is required. As Sena- 
 tor Hoar once told the highest scholars 
 in Harvard College, much of the good 
 work in the world has been that of dull 
 men who have done their best. Moder- 
 ate intelligence, with devotion behind it, 
 and with constant exercise in the right 
 direction, has produced some of the most 
 valuable among men and women. 
 
 The best thing education can do is to 
 make moral character efficient through 
 mental discipline. Here we come to the 
 need of training, and to the question 
 whether the education of to-day trains 
 boys and girls (I do not say as it should, 
 but as it might) for thorough, and re- 
 sponsible, and unselfish work. 
 
 Professor A. S. Hill cautions writers 
 against " announcing platitudes as if 
 they were oracles," and against " apolo- 
 gizing for them as if they were original 
 sin." I am in danger of both these trans- 
 gressions. In proclaiming that there is no
 
 92 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 education without hard work, I may seem 
 to proclaim a platitude of the first water ; 
 yet you can hardly call any proposition 
 a platitude if its acceptance depends on 
 its interpretation. To me the proposi- 
 tion means, nobody can get an_education 
 without working for it ; to some others 
 it appears to mean, nobody can get an 
 education without other people's work- 
 ing to give it to him, or even to make 
 him like it well enough to take it ; and 
 my interpretation, that he cannot get it 
 without working hard himself, though it 
 strikes me as so obvious that I am half 
 ashamed to mention it, strikes others as 
 a reversion to a narrow and harsh con- 
 servatism, to the original sin of a time 
 when an education was a Procrustes 
 bed, which now strained and stretched 
 the mind until it broke, and now lopped 
 every delicate outgrowth of the soul. 
 
 Of all discoveries in modern education 
 the most beautiful is the recognition of 
 individual need and individual claim,
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 93 
 
 of the infinite and fascinating variety in 
 human capacity, of the awful responsi- 
 bility for those who by the pressure of 
 dull routine would stifle a human soul, 
 of the almost divine mission for those 
 who help a human soul into the fulness 
 of life. For what is nearer the divine 
 than to see that a child has life, and 
 has it more abundantly? "The past was 
 wrong," says the educator of to-day; " let 
 us right it. Education has been dark 
 and cruel ; let us make it bright and 
 kind." Thus it comes to pass that, as 
 many a prosperous father whose boy- 
 hood was pinched by poverty is deter- 
 mined that his son shall not suffer as he 
 himself has suffered, and throws away 
 on him money wnich he in turn throws 
 away on folly and on vice, as such a 
 father saps a young man's strength in 
 trying to be generous, so does many 
 an educator of to-day, atoning for the 
 cruelty of the past by the enervating 
 luxury of the present, sap a child's
 
 94 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 strength in trying to be kind, change a 
 Procrustes bed to a bed of roses. Cruel 
 as it is to assume that a boy or a girl 
 who is dull in one or two prescribed 
 subjects is a dunce, it may be equally 
 cruel to watch every inclination of the 
 young mind, and to bend school re- 
 quirements to its desires and whims. 
 How many persons we know whose 
 lives and whose friends' lives are em- 
 bittered because they have had from 
 childhood their own way, and who, if 
 their eyes are once opened to the sel- 
 fishness of their position, denounce the 
 weakness of those who in their child- 
 hood yielded to them ! Unless we aban- 
 don as obsolete the notion that children 
 are the better for obedience, why should 
 we give them full swing in the choice 
 of a time for doing sums or for learning 
 to read ? If we do not insist that a boy 
 shall brush his hair till he longs to have 
 it smooth, and if then we brush it for 
 him, we are not educating him in either
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 95 
 
 neatness or efficiency ; and for aught 
 I can see, the analogy holds good. I 
 once knew a boy of sixteen or seven- 
 teen whose mother had done most of 
 his reading for him. His eyes were 
 sharp enough for things he liked (such 
 as turtles and snakes) ; but he had 
 trained them so little in the alphabet that 
 in Latin he was quite impartial in decid- 
 ing whether u followed by t was ut or 
 tu. The effect on his translation may be 
 easily conceived. I do not mean that he 
 made this particular mistake many times ; 
 I mean that he was constantly making- 
 mistakes of this character ; that in general 
 he had not been trained to observe just 
 what were the letters before him, or in 
 what order they came. Why then teach 
 him Latin? He was to be a scientific 
 man, and needed some language beside 
 his own : yet how could he learn a foreign 
 language ? how could he learn his own 
 language ? how could he learn anything 
 from a book ? how was he training him-
 
 96 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 self to be "there"? "Do not make a 
 child read," some educators say, " until 
 he finds the need of reading, and learns 
 for his own pleasure. Do not enfeeble 
 his mind by forcing it." " Do not en- 
 feeble his mind," one might answer, " by 
 letting it go undisciplined." If he begins 
 late, when he has felt the need, he may 
 learn to read rapidly ; but will he have 
 the patience for those small accuracies 
 which form the basis of accuracy in later 
 life, and which, unless learned early, are 
 seldom learned at all ? Do not give the 
 child long hours ; do not take away the 
 freshness of his mind by pressing him ; 
 go slowly, but go thoroughly. Teach 
 him, whatever he does, to do it as well 
 as he can. Then show him how next 
 time he can do better ; and when next 
 time comes, make him do better. How- 
 ever short the school hours may be, 
 however much outside of the school may 
 rouse or charm his mind, make him feel 
 that school standards are high, that
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 97 
 
 school work is to be done, and done well. 
 If you are teaching a girl to sweep, you 
 do not let her sweep the lint under the 
 table. Why, if you are teaching a child 
 to study, should you let him study in a 
 slovenly way ? Why, for instance, should 
 you teach him reading without spelling? 
 Get into him as early as you can a habit 
 of thoroughness as an end in itself, of 
 thoroughness for its own sake, and he 
 will soon find that being thorough is 
 interesting; that against the pain of 
 working when he feels indolent, he may 
 match the pain of not doing what ought 
 to be done, just as one kind of microbe 
 is injected to kill another. When he 
 once gets this habit firmly fixed in him 
 (I may say, when it has once fixed itself 
 upon him), he may have all sorts of in- 
 tellectual freedom and be safe. 
 
 Immature people constantly cry out 
 n gainst routine. Yet routine is an almost 
 necessary condition of effective human 
 life. An undisciplined genius, like Shel-
 
 98 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 ley's, inspires now and then ; a spirit like 
 Milton's, as eager for liberty, and as 
 impatient of bondage, yet forced, by the 
 man it animated, to do his bidding, 
 which rightly or wrongly he believed to 
 be the bidding of God, inspires oftener 
 and deeper. If routine is forced upon us, 
 we are delivered from the great tempta- 
 tion of letting industry become a matter 
 of caprice, and of waiting for perfect 
 mental and physical conditions (Italiam 
 fugientem ) before we settle down to our 
 work. If routine is not forced upon us, 
 we must force it upon ourselves, or we 
 shall go to pieces. " Professor X is a 
 dry teacher. Shakspere is the greatest 
 of poets, and hence one of the greatest 
 inspirers of men. Why is n't it better to 
 cut Professor X's lecture and read Shak- 
 spere, or even to read Kipling ?" First 
 and obviously, because you can read 
 Shakspere at another time, whereas Pro- 
 fessor X's lecture is given at a fixed hour, 
 is part of a course, and a link in an im-
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 99 
 
 portant chain. Next, because attending 
 Professor X's lecture is for the time be- 
 ing your business. The habit of attend- 
 ing to business is a habit you must form 
 and keep, before you can be regarded 
 as " there." Moreover this habit does 
 away with all manner of time-wasting 
 indecision. If you take the hour for 
 Shakspere, you may spend half of it 
 in questioning what play to begin, or 
 whether to read another author after all, 
 and meantime a friend drops in. "I 
 know a person," says Professor James, 
 " who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, 
 pick dust-specks from the floor, arrange 
 his table, snatch up the newspaper, take 
 down any book which catches his eye, 
 trim his nails, waste the morning any- 
 how, in short, and all without premedi- 
 tation, simply because the one thing 
 he ought to attend to is the preparation 
 of a noon-day lesson in formal logic 
 which he detests anything but that!" 
 It is astonishing how eagerly men strug-
 
 ioo ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 gle to escape from the training that pre 
 pares them for life, how they labor to 
 convince themselves that what they long 
 to do is worthier and nobler than what 
 they ought to do and must do if they 
 are to succeed in what they long to do. 
 I once knew a student, against all ad- 
 vice, to leave college in the middle of 
 the Freshman year, because, since he 
 was going into the ministry, he was 
 eager to devote his whole time to the 
 Bible. Later he saw his mistake, and 
 came back. I knew another and a wiser 
 student who, having gone into the min- 
 istry without a college education, left it 
 for years of sacrifice in money and of the 
 hardest kind of work, to win that know- 
 ledge of books and men without which 
 no modern minister is equipped for effi- 
 cient service. The efficient people are 
 those who know their business and do it 
 promptly and patiently, who when lei- 
 sure comes have earned it, and know 
 they have earned it ; who when one
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 101 
 
 thing is done can turn their attention 
 squarely and completely to the next 
 thing, and do that. The efficient student 
 is he who has as nearly as possible a 
 fixed time for every part of his work ; 
 who, if he has a recitation at ten and 
 another at twelve, knows in advance 
 what he is to study at eleven. He has 
 most time for work and most time for 
 unalloyed play, since he makes use of 
 that invaluable friend to labor, routine. 
 " Habit," says the Autocrat of the Break- 
 fast Table, " is a labor-saving invention 
 which enables a man to get along with 
 less fuel, that is all; for fuel is force, 
 you know, just as much in the page I 
 am writing for you as in the locomo- 
 tive or the legs which carry it to you." 
 "Habit," says Professor James, "simplifies 
 our movements, makes them accurate, 
 and diminishes fatigue." " Man, " he 
 continues, "is born with a tendency to 
 do more things than he has ready-made 
 arrangements for in his nerve-centres.
 
 102 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 Most of the performances of other animals 
 are automatic. But in him the number of 
 them is so enormous that most of them 
 must be the fruit of painful study. If 
 practice did not make perfect, nor habit 
 economize the expense of nervous and 
 muscular energy, he would be in a sorry 
 plight. As Dr. Maudsley says : ' If an 
 act became no easier after being done 
 several times, if the careful direction of 
 consciousness were necessary to its ac- 
 complishment on each occasion, it is 
 evident that the whole activity of a life- 
 time might be confined to one or two 
 deeds that no progress could take place 
 in development. A man might be oc- 
 cupied all day in dressing and undress- 
 ing himself; the attitude of his body 
 would absorb all his attention and en- 
 ergy ; the washing of his hands or the 
 fastening of a button would be as diffi- 
 cult to him on each occasion as to the 
 child on its first trial ; and he would, 
 furthermore, be completely exhausted by
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 103 
 
 his exertions.' ' " The great thing, then, 
 in all education," says Professor James, 
 "is to make our nervous system our ally 
 instead of our enemy. It is to fund and 
 capitalize our acquisitions, and live at 
 ease upon the interest of the fund. For 
 this we must make automatic and habit- 
 ual, as early as possible, as many useful 
 actions as we can, and guard against 
 the growing into ways that are likely 
 to be disadvantageous to us, as we 
 should guard against the plague. The 
 more of the details of our daily life we 
 can hand over to the effortless custody 
 of automatism, the more our higher 
 powers of mind will be set free for their 
 own proper work. There is no more 
 miserable human being than one in 
 whom nothing is habitual but indeci- 
 sion. . . . Full half the time of such a 
 man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of 
 matters which ought to be so ingrained 
 in him as practically not to exist for his 
 consciousness at all. If there be such
 
 104 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 daily duties not yet ingrained in any one 
 of my readers, let him begin this very 
 hour to set the matter right." 
 
 All this shows the true meaning of 
 thoroughness. I have heard it said that 
 thoroughness in education is precisely 
 what we do not want, since thorough 
 work becomes mechanical work, and 
 robs the student of that creative joy 
 which should accompany every exercise 
 of the mind. Yet it is the "effortless 
 custody of automatism" in the lower 
 things that frees the mind for creative 
 joy in the higher. The pianist who 
 cannot through long practice commit 
 to routine all the ordinary movements of 
 the fingers on the keys can never play 
 the music of Schumann or of Beethoven. 
 Sometimes I think that our happiness 
 depends chiefly on our cheerful accept- 
 ance of routine, on our refusal to as- 
 sume, as many do, that daily work and 
 daily duty are a kind of slavery. If 
 we can learn to think of routine as
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 105 
 
 the best economy, we shall not despise 
 it. People call it benumbing ; and so it 
 is if we do not understand it : but if we 
 understand that through it we can do 
 more work in less time, and have more 
 time left for the expansion of our souls, 
 that through it we cultivate the habit 
 which makes people know^ we can be 
 counted on, we shall cease to say hard 
 things of it. Even in those whose lives 
 are narrowly circumscribed, we see the 
 splendid courage and fidelity which 
 come with faithful routine. The longer 
 I live, the more I admire as a class the 
 women who fill small positions in New 
 England public schools, the typical 
 schoolmistresses or " schoolmarms " of 
 our more Puritanical towns and villages. 
 Their notions of English grammar are 
 as inflexible as their notions of duty ; 
 like Overbury's Pedant, they " dare not 
 think a thought that the nominative 
 case governs not the verb ; " their theo- 
 logy may be as narrow as their philology ;
 
 io6 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 they have little primnesses that make us 
 smile : but they have the hearts of hero- 
 ines. Pitifully paid, often with others to 
 support, often subject to ignorant and 
 wrong-headed committees, and obliged 
 against every instinct to adopt new 
 methods when education is periodically 
 overhauled, often with little physical 
 health, and living on courage and " wire," 
 with few social diversions higher than 
 the Sunday School picnic, and few hopes 
 of rest in this world higher than the Home 
 for Aged Women, they are at their posts 
 day by day, week by week, year by year, 
 because they are, as Milton said of 
 Cromwell, 
 
 "Guided by faith and matchless fortitude." 
 
 What is more inspiring than the men and 
 women who are "there," and "there" 
 not in the high and ambitious moments 
 of life, but on the obscure dead levels 
 that take the heart out of any one 
 who does not see the glory of common 
 things ?
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 107 
 
 These schoolmistresses, though they 
 may not know it, illustrate the absolute 
 necessity of routine for steadily effective 
 living. In little things they may show 
 the hard and wooden quality of a mind 
 that works in the treadmill day after 
 day, and may thus give a handle to those 
 critics who scoff at routine ; but if their 
 small accuracies seem pretentiously lit- 
 tle, their devotion is unpretentiously 
 great. Through habit, supported by un- 
 yielding conscience, they have forced 
 upon themselves a routine without which 
 they could not live. 
 
 A boy when he meets with loss or 
 grief or disaster, or even when he feels 
 the excitement of joyful expectation, is 
 likely to stop work altogether. He has 
 "no heart for it," he says; he "cannot 
 do it." A young man crossed in love, a 
 young woman who loses father, mother, 
 or bosom friend these may pine and 
 fret, and suffer the sorrow for days, or 
 weeks, or months, to stop their lives,
 
 io8 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 may cease to live except as burdens to 
 themselves and others ; but, young or 
 old, a trained man or woman whose 
 heart and will are strong keeps on. 
 There is always somebody or something 
 to work for ; and while there is, life must 
 be, and shall become, worth living. " In 
 summer or winter," said the proud ad- 
 vertisement of an old steamboat line, 
 " In summer or winter, in storm or calm, 
 the Commonwealth and the Plymouth 
 Rock invariably make the passage;" 
 and this should be the truth about you 
 and me. 
 
 The use of routine to make a sad life 
 endurable was once brought clearly be- 
 fore my mind as I watched the polar 
 bears in the Zoological Garden at Cen- 
 tral Park. In a kind of grotto cut in a 
 hillside, two polar bears were caged. 
 Two sides of the cage were of sheer 
 rock ; two were of iron, one separating 
 the polar bears from the grizzly bears,
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 109 
 
 and one separating them from the spec- 
 tators in the Park. The floor of the 
 grotto between the steep rock and the 
 pool of water which represented the Arc- 
 tic Ocean was narrow ; but on it one of 
 the bears was exercising with a rhythmic 
 motion strange and inexpressibly sad. 
 He moved from the centre of the grotto 
 two or three steps toward the rock, 
 swung his head wide and low three 
 times to the right and three times to the 
 left, with a sweep like that of a scythe, 
 stepped back two or three paces, com- 
 pleting a sort of ellipse, stepped forward 
 again, swung his head right and left 
 again three times, precisely as before, 
 then back, then forward, then swinging, 
 on and on and on. At intervals, whether 
 with numerical precision or not I cannot 
 say, he broke his circuit, walked to the 
 iron fence between him and the grizzly 
 bears, walked back, and began once 
 more the round of motions devised, as it 
 seemed, to save him from madness or
 
 I io ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 from death. Three times that day I vis- 
 ited him ; and always I found him at his 
 self - appointed task, forward, swing, 
 back, forward, swing, back, on and on 
 and on. The rocky bottom of his den 
 was worn into holes where, always in the 
 same spots, he set his feet in this forlorn 
 attempt to put a saving routine into a 
 hopeless life. Near him, in a narrow 
 house with a little window-like door, a 
 small brown bear moved round and 
 round, casting one quick, sharp glance 
 at the outer world in every round, as he 
 walked briskly by the door ; and in a 
 neighboring house a hyena strode angrily 
 back and forth, and back and forth, and 
 back and forth again. Here were captive 
 animals finding in routine the nearest 
 possible approach to an enrichment of 
 their lives. 
 
 The reaction against routine in mod- 
 ern education, the notion that children 
 should be pleased with a variety of sub- 
 jects made easy and interesting, rather
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS in 
 
 than drilled in a few, and roused to in- 
 terest themselves in these few and in 
 the thoroughness that drill demands, ac- 
 counts, I believe, in large measure for 
 the collapse of many a student's will be- 
 fore any subject that requires hard math- 
 ematical thinking. In Harvard College 
 an elementary course in philosophy used 
 to begin with lectures on psychology, 
 which fascinated the class ; but " oh, 
 the heavy change" when in the second 
 half-year psychology gave place to logic ! 
 The text -book, " Jevons's Elementary 
 Lessons," is so simple that any youth of 
 fair intelligence who will come to close 
 quarters with it should master it with ease; 
 yet more than one student, apparently in 
 full health and intelligence, declared that 
 he could make nothing of it, that it was 
 too hard for him altogether. He asked 
 to leave the course, to count the first half 
 of it toward his degree, and to take up 
 something more congenial. These boys, 
 through the labor-saving appliances of
 
 112 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 their schools, supplemented by their 
 choice of lecture courses in college, had 
 lost, or what is almost as bad, thought 
 they had lost, the power of close logical 
 application. Worst of all, they had lost 
 the stimulus of surmounting difficulties. 
 How were they training themselves to 
 be " there " ? 
 
 I constantly meet students who declare 
 that they cannot learn geometry. This 
 commonly means that they hate geome- 
 try so cordially as never to give it their 
 close attention. There may be some in- 
 telligent persons who cannot learn geo- 
 metry; but the vast majority of those 
 who think they cannot learn it, learn it 
 if they have to. 
 
 " I hold very strongly," says Cardinal 
 Newman, " that the first step in intellec- 
 tual training is to impress upon a boy's 
 mind the idea of science, method, order, 
 principle, and system ; of rule and excep- 
 tion, of richness and harmony. This is 
 commonly and excellently done by mak-
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 113 
 
 ing him begin with Grammar ; nor can 
 too great accuracy, or minuteness and 
 subtlety of teaching be used towards him, 
 as his faculties expand, with this simple 
 purpose. Hence it is that critical scholar- 
 ship is so important a discipline for him 
 when he is leaving school for the Uni- 
 versity. A second science is the Mathe- 
 matics : this should follow Grammar, still 
 with the same object, viz., to give him a 
 conception of development and arrange- 
 ment from and around a common centre. 
 Hence it is that Chronology and Geo- 
 graphy are so necessary for him, when 
 he reads History, which is otherwise lit- 
 tle better than a story-book. Hence, too, 
 Metrical Composition, when he reads 
 Poetry ; in order to stimulate his powers 
 into action in every practicable way, and 
 to prevent a merely passive reception of 
 images and ideas which in that case are 
 likely to pass out of the mind as soon as 
 they have entered it. Let him once gain 
 this habit of method, of starting from
 
 H4 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 fixed points, of making his ground good 
 as he goes, of distinguishing what he 
 knows from what he does not know, and 
 I conceive he will be gradually initiated 
 into the largest and truest philosophical 
 views, and will feel nothing but impa- 
 tience and disgust at the random theories 
 and imposing sophistries and dashing 
 paradoxes, which carry away half-formed 
 and superficial intellects." 
 
 The child who learns to do small things 
 well when he is small gets the best train- 
 ing for doing big things well when he is 
 big. He lifts the calf every day ; and 
 behold, he has lifted the cow ! Wherever 
 you go, you meet, not merely people who 
 scamp their work, but people who do not 
 know the difference between a good job 
 and a bad one. " My great difficulty," 
 says the master of a large private school, 
 " is to find teachers who know anything, 
 or who seem as if they had ever seen 
 anybody that knew anything. They have 
 plenty of ' educational progress ' and
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 115 
 
 ' educational theory ; ' but they don't 
 know anything." After all, why should 
 they know anything ? They have a good 
 deal of more or less accurate information, 
 such as people get who have studied what 
 came easiest and seemed at the time most 
 interesting, and have let the rest go. 
 Then, with a little pedagogy superadded, 
 they have been turned loose to hand 
 down their principles to others.. " The 
 Austrian ballet" [Australian ballot], a 
 New York schoolgirl wrote in an exam- 
 ination book, " was introduced into this 
 country by Cleveland to corrupt the peo- 
 ple and keep it secret." The state of mind 
 evinced by this sentence has been too 
 common in school children under any 
 system of learning ; but I believe we do 
 less to clear it now than when we paid 
 more attention to those fundamental 
 principles which tend to promote accu- 
 racy in thought and in expression. 
 
 I have said elsewhere and I believe 
 it with all my might that one reason
 
 ii6 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 for the hold of athletic sport on our 
 schools and colleges is its awakening in 
 many boys their first, or almost their 
 first, ambition to do something as well 
 as it can be done, and the recognition of 
 severe routine as a means to that end. 
 In football they are judged by an in- 
 numerable jury of their peers. Failure 
 is public disgrace ; success, if decently 
 bought, is glory. " Jack," said a great 
 football player to a shiftless student 
 whom he was trying to look after mor- 
 ally, " did you ever do anything as well 
 as you could?" "No, Tom," said the 
 other, " I don't believe I ever did." The 
 amateur athlete is held up to his best 
 by the immediate, certain, and wide- 
 spread fame of good playing, and the 
 equally prompt and notorious shame of 
 bad playing. He is held up, further, by 
 the conviction that what he is doing is 
 for his college or for his school. Never 
 again, unless he holds public office, will 
 such a searchlight be turned on him;
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 117 
 
 and never again will so many persons 
 see what he does or fails to do. As a re- 
 sult, a thoroughly trained football player, 
 meeting the supreme test, may find him- 
 self lifted up by the inspiration of the 
 moment, of the crowd, of the cheering, 
 and of college patriotism, so that as 
 some one has put it he plays better 
 than he knows how. In a few instances 
 every man in a team plays better than 
 he knows how. 
 
 Older people can hardly appreciate 
 the stimulus to every power of mind and 
 body in a great athletic contest. Here 
 is work in which youth itself is an ad- 
 vantage, in which the highest honor 
 may be won by a young man who has 
 missed all earlier opportunities for doing 
 anything as well as he knew how ; here 
 is a fresh chance to show of what stuff 
 mental and physical he is made, 
 and a cause that appeals to youth so 
 strongly as to make obstacles springs of 
 courage. Here is something that rouses
 
 u8 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 a young man's powers as the elective 
 system in study is designed to do, yet 
 does not require that basis of intellectual 
 accuracy which is essential to success in 
 study. Here, also, is something in which 
 a young man who can succeed knows 
 that success may mean an opening for 
 the work of his life. Thousands of men 
 actually see his success with their own 
 eyes ; thousands more hear of it. If on 
 graduation he applies for work, he is 
 not the unknown quantity that a young 
 graduate usually is. He has already 
 been tried in times of stress and found 
 not wanting. If, as sometimes happens, 
 he has shown, not merely that he is al- 
 ways to be counted on, but that in the 
 thick of things he is inspired and inspir- 
 ing, he has marked himself as a leader 
 of men. Besides, no man can thoroughly 
 succeed in football who plays for himself 
 alone. There are few more searching 
 tests of men's motives and spirit. This is 
 why class officers chosen from football
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 119 
 
 players are almost invariably good men. 
 On the gridiron field their classmates 
 learn who have self-control, courage, en- 
 durance, minds quick in emergencies, 
 devotion to class and college, and who 
 play to the grand stand, and unless they 
 can be spectacular are of no use. 
 
 I dwell on football because its hold on 
 a college is often misunderstood by per- 
 sons who think of it merely as a brutal, 
 tricky, and sadly exaggerated pastime, 
 and not, in spite of its evils, as a test of 
 generalship, physical and moral prow- 
 ess, quickness of body and mind ; and 
 because it is a good illustration of a vis- 
 ible and practical purpose (crossing the 
 enemy's goal line) fired by an ideal (the 
 honor and glory of a college). The full 
 strength of college feeling does not come 
 to a man until years after his gradua- 
 tion ; but he knows something of it when 
 he " lines up " beside his old school en- 
 emy against an old school friend, who, 
 at the parting of the ways, has chosen
 
 120 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 another Alma Mater. As years go by, 
 his love of college becomes second only 
 to his love of country. The college be- 
 comes more and more a human being, 
 for whom it is an honor to work, to live, 
 and to die. Indeed, every man who has 
 once taken her name is in some sense 
 bound to work, to live, and to die for 
 her. In business, in politics, in religion, 
 in everything, it is she who cheers him, 
 as he struggles to hold his standard 
 high. Much modern teaching dwells on 
 the development of self ; yet he who de- 
 votes himself to the rounding out of his 
 own powers may be good for nothing, 
 whereas he who devotes himself to what 
 he loves better than himself, and thus 
 abandons much that looks good for him 
 because he must do something else with 
 his whole heart, must do it often in a 
 romantic and what may seem a reckless 
 loyalty, such a man achieves a power 
 beyond the reach of the professional self- 
 developer. Education is not in a high
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 121 
 
 sense practical unless it has an ideal in 
 it and round about it. I know the com- 
 mon talk that colleges unfit their stu- 
 dents for those daily duties which might 
 chafe a mind that has tasted intellectual 
 joy. No college can make everybody 
 unselfish and wise ; yet among human 
 powers for unselfishness and wisdom I 
 know none like that of a healthy college. 
 If by a practical life we mean such a 
 life of service as is not merely endured 
 but enjoyed, lived with enthusiasm, then 
 surely the most unpractical people in the 
 world are the men and women who put 
 away their ideals as childish things. 
 " The light of a whole life dies 
 When love is done," 
 
 a poet says ; and though he means the 
 love between man and woman, his verse 
 would be more deeply true if "love" 
 might take on the wider meaning of 
 that faith and energy and courage and 
 enthusiasm which light the dim and tor- 
 tuous way. With this, no life while sense
 
 122 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 remains can be crushed by drudgery or 
 woe. Without it, a life of drudgery is a 
 life of Egyptian darkness. " Where there 
 is no vision the people perish." 
 
 The college helps her sons and daugh- 
 ters to keep alive the vision. She dif- 
 fuses about them what Mr. Justice 
 Holmes has called "an aroma of high 
 feeling, not to be found or lost in science 
 or Greek, not to be fixed, yet all-per- 
 vading." She shows, in steady bright- 
 ness to the best, in flashing glimpses to 
 the worst, the vision without which there 
 is no life. She teaches her children not 
 to shun drudgery but to do the work, 
 and in doing it to know its higher end. 
 The question whether a thing is ever- 
 lasting truth or commonplace is often 
 a question whether it has or has not a 
 light in it. Homer, even when he tells 
 us how Telemachus put on his clothes, 
 is not commonplace. " I suppose," says 
 Ruskin, " the passage in the Iliad which 
 on the whole has excited most admira-
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 123 
 
 tion is that which describes a wife's sor- 
 row at parting from her husband, and a 
 child's fright at its father's helmet." It 
 is education that helps us see, as Homer 
 saw, the high meaning of the common- 
 place in every part of life, the beauty 
 whereby the drudgery of daily life be- 
 comes transfigured. It is education that 
 teaches us not to measure the best things 
 in the world by money. It is educated 
 men and women, beyond all others, who 
 throw into their work that eager sacri- 
 fice of love for which no money can pay, 
 and to which, when work cries out to 
 be done, no task is too forbidding, no 
 hours are too long. The practical life is 
 the life of steady, persistent, intelligent, 
 courageous work, widening its horizon 
 as the worker grows in knowledge, and, 
 by doing well what lies before him, fits 
 himself for harder and higher tasks. But 
 the practical life of educated men and 
 women is, or should be, even more than 
 this. It makes, or should make, every
 
 124 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 task the expression of an enlightened 
 spirit. There were in the nineteenth 
 century Jew lives more practical than 
 those of the " heroic boys " who, in the 
 exquisite words of their old comrade, 
 "gave freely and eagerly all that they 
 had or hoped for to their country and 
 to their fellow-men in the hour of great 
 need." In such a practical life as every 
 man or woman ought to lead, such a 
 practical life as educated men and wo- 
 men are bound to lead or be false to 
 their trust, it is the vision that abides 
 and commands.
 
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