affinity between the ink and the literary Liddell. The marble statue has been replaced by one of plaster. Compared with the usual Oxford rag, the upsetting of Professor Silliman's statue in the Yale campus by means of a lasso dwindles into insignificance, and the painting of 'varsity stockings on John Harvard, which so scandalized the undergraduates that they repaired the damage by voluntary subscriptions, might be regarded as an act of filial piety. The more I learned of Oxford motives, the less anxious I was to censure the system of ragging. In an article I wrote after only a few months' stay, I spoke of it as boyish and undignified; and most Americans, I feel sure, would likewise hold up the hand of public horror. Yet I cannot be wholly thankful that we are not as they. To the undergraduates, ragging is a survival of the excellently efficient system of discipline in the public schools, where the older boys have charge of the manners and morals of the younger; and historically, like public school discipline, it is an inheritance from the prehistoric past. In the Middle Ages it was apparently the custom to hold the victim's nose literally to the grindstone. In the schools, to be sure, the Sixth Form take their duties with great sobriety of conscience--which is not altogether the case in college; but the difference of spirit is perhaps justifiable. For a properly authorized committee of big schoolboys to chastise a youngster who has transgressed is not unnatural, and the system that provides for it has proved successful for five centuries; but for men to adopt the same attitude towards a fellow only a year or two their junior would be preposterous. Horseplay is a necessary part of the game. The end in both is the same: it is to bring each individual under the influence of the traditions and standards of the institution of which he has elected to be a part. Just as the system of breakfasting freshmen is by no means as altruistic as it at first appears, the practice of ragging is by no means as brutal. It is as if the college said: We have admitted you and welcomed you, opening up the way to every avenue of enjoyment and profit, and it is for our common good, sir, that you be told of your shortcomings. The most diligent and distinguished scholar is not unlikely to be most in need of a pointed lesson in personal decorum; and the man who was not Asher may be thankful all his life for the bad quarter of an hour that taught him the difference between those who do and those who do not abide in their breaches.