Twice or thrice again during my undergraduate life, did the same thing happen--a flurry among the students, a remonstrance much too late, against a deed of apparent injustice, a cry in the night, and then silence. Now, had I known more about the world, I should have understood that these nocturnal disturbances were signs of the times, that what we had heard in all these cases was the operation of the guillotine which exists in every American institution of learning, and runs fast or slow according to the progress of the times. The thing that a little astonished the undergraduate at the time was that in almost every case of summary decapitation the victim was an educated gentleman. And this was not because no other kind of man could be found in the faculty. It seemed as if some whimsical fatality hung over the professorial career of any ingenuous gentleman who was by nature a scholar of the charming, old-fashioned kind. Youth grieves not long over mysterious injustice, and it never occurred to me till many years afterward that there was any logical connection between one and another of all these judicial murders which used to claim a passing tear from the undergraduate at Harvard. It is only since giving some thought to recent educational conditions in America, that I have understood what was then happening, and why it was that a scholar could hardly live in an American University. In America, society has been reorganized since 1870; the old universities have been totally changed and many new ones founded. The money to do this has come from the business world. The men chosen to do the work have been chosen by the business world. Of a truth, it must needs be that offenses come; but woe be unto him through whom the offense cometh. As the Boss has been the tool of the business man in politics, so the College president has been his agent in education. The colleges during this epoch have each had a “policy” and a directorate. They have been manned and commissioned for a certain kind of service, as you might man a fishing-smack to catch herring. There has been so much necessary business--the business of expanding and planning, of adapting and remodeling--that there has been no time for education. Some big deal has always been pending in each college--some consolidation of departments, some annexation of a new world--something so momentous as to make private opinion a nuisance. In this regard the colleges have resembled everything else in America. The colleges have simply not been different from the rest of American life. Let a man express an opinion at a party caucus, or at a railroad directors’ meeting, or at a college faculty meeting, and he will find that he is speaking against a predetermined force. What shall we do with such a fellow? Well, if he is old and distinguished, you may suffer him to have his say, and then override him. But if he is young, energetic, and likely to give more trouble, you must eject him with as little fuss as