With regard to the dons, a similar case might be made. Any one who assumes an authority over grown men that is so nearly absolute should be held to strict honesty and justice of dealing. So far as I could learn, the Christ Church dons who were so severely dealt with were both unjust and insincere, and I came to sympathize in some measure with the undergraduates at the House, who were half humorously inclined to regard the forty outcasts as martyrs. This is not to argue that all American hazing is justifiable. In many cases, especially of late years, it has been as silly and brutal as the most puritanical moralists have declared. To steal the Louisburg Cross from above the door of the Harvard Library was vandalism if you wish--it was certainly a very stupid proceeding; and to celebrate a really notable athletic victory by mutilating the pedestal of the statue of John Harvard was not only stupid, but unworthy of a true sportsman. How much better to make an end with painting 'varsity stockings on the dear old boy's bronze legs, and leave the goody to wash them off next day. What I wish to point out is that where there is vigorous public spirit, it may be more efficiently expressed by hazing than by a very nor'easter of Puritan morality. A tradition of the late master of Balliol, Jowett, the great humanist, would seem to show that he held some such opinion. It was his custom in his declining years to walk after breakfast in the garden quad, and whenever there were evidences of a rag, even to the extent of broken windows, he would say cheerily to his _fidus Achates_, "Ah, Hardie, the mind of the college is still vigorous; it has been expressing itself." The best possible justification of the cloistral restrictions of English college life is the facility with which the mind of the college expresses itself. It is by no means fantastic to hint that the decline of well-considered hazing in American colleges has come step by step with the breaking up of the bonds of hospitality and comradeship that used to make them well-organized social communities.