The most marked trait in American college life is its spirit of caste. This same spirit, it is true, manifests itself in other lands--in England, France and Germany. In fact, it reached its extreme development in the last-named country: the very term _Philistia_ is of German coinage. The causes that originated and kept alive this spirit in Europe are obvious. During the Middle Ages students enjoyed privileges such as made them, in the strictest legal sense, a distinct class. Thus, they had the right to wear side-arms, and had their own courts of justice. Some of these privileges have survived, in England and Germany at least, to the present day. Yet even in Germany the old student spirit is evidently on the wane, and is doomed to extinction at a day not far distant. In America, on the contrary, where like causes have never operated, the spirit exists in force. It is due to peculiar causes--to college life, to locality and to the mode of teaching. The tendency to monkish seclusion lingers in England and America, the lands that have led the van in political and social progress. The motives that urged the monks of the olden time to turn their backs upon the world and bury themselves in cloisters were praiseworthy: but for such havens of peace, letters might have perished. When the Reformation was carried out in England, and the sequestration of Church property left immense convents idle, it was only natural that the newly-established colleges and halls should convert the buildings to their own uses. The dormitory system of Oxford and Cambridge, accordingly, has an historic right of being; and, growing by natural laws, it has become so rooted in the national life that nothing short of a political revolution, greater even than that of the seventeenth century, could eradicate it. The founders of our earliest colleges were governed by the desire to make them conform as closely as might be to the English model. There is scarcely the trace of a disposition to look to the institutions of continental Europe for guidance. This was a matter of course. The founders of our colleges and the men whom they selected to be teachers were Englishmen by descent or by education, trained after the English fashion--seeking freedom in America, yet at heart sympathizing with English thought, English habits and English prejudices. Hence the establishment of our dormitory system--not at once nor in all the fullness of a system. The colleges were at first little more than schools. The scholars boarded with the professors: there were no funds for the erection of separate buildings. But soon we see the evidences of a persistent effort to make each college an embryonic Oxford or Cambridge. Harvard, Yale and Princeton before completing the first half century of existence were committed to the dormitory system. Other colleges have followed the example thus set. The exceptions are too few to need enumeration.