As it may never again happen to me to be writing about colleges, I
desire to say in this paper everything I have to say on the subject,
and therefore take this opportunity to refer to the practice of
"hazing," although it is but remotely connected with Class-Day. If we
should find it among hinds, a remnant of the barbarisms of the Dark
Ages, blindly handed down by such slow-growing people as go to mill
with their meal on side of the saddle and a stone on the other to
balance, as their fathers did, because it never occurred to them to
divide the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should
be surprised; but "hazing" occurs among boys who have been accustomed
to the circulation of ideas, boys old enough and intelligent enough
understand the difference between brutality and frolic, old enough to
know what honor and rage mean, and therefore I cannot conceive how they
should countenance a practice which entirely ignores and defies honor,
and which not a single redeeming feature. It has neither wisdom nor
wit, no spirit, no genius, no impulsiveness, scarcely boyish mirth. A
narrow range of stale practical jokes, lighted up by no gleam of
originality, seems to be transmitted from year to year with as much
fidelity as the Hebrew Bible, and not half the latitude allowed to
clergymen of the English Established Church. But besides its
platitude, its one over-powering and fatal characteristic is its
intense and essential cowardice. Cowardice is its head and front and
bones and blood. One boy does not single out another boy of his own
weight, and take his chances in a fair stand-up fight. But a party of
Sophomores club together in such numbers as to render opposition
useless, and pounce upon their victim unawares, as Brooks and his
minions pounced upon Sumner, and as the Southern chivalry is given to
doing. For sweet pity's sake, let this mode of warfare be monopolized
by the Southern chivalry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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