Jena, be it said in her praise, is no longer what she was: her students no longer break window-panes or perform the _Gänsemarsch_ or elect their beer-duke of Lichtenhain. The great herd has scattered, and the few who are left dwell with their professors in peace. But has the spirit of brutality passed wholly away? Perhaps loving parents who have placed their sons under the "protecting" influence of some quiet country town believe so. It is almost a pity to disturb their faith. Yet truth is uncompromising. Let us record and ponder the fact--epithets are superfluous--that in the year of grace 1874, in a small college town not one hundred miles distant from the City of Brotherly Love, students supposed to be guided and restrained by influences more distinctively "Christian" than any that ever mitigated the barbarism of Jena, could become utterly lost to all recollection of father and mother, brother and sister, could forget their own manhood, could steal under cover of night to the house of an unpopular professor and bombard the windows, to the peril of his wife and mother, and of his child in the cradle. Truly, we have been surfeited with mistaken praise of small colleges and rural virtue. We have a right to demand that our colleges, whatever they may undertake or omit, shall teach at least the first lesson of life--manliness. This lesson is not best learned by withdrawing one's self from the world, burying one's self in an obscure and unrefined village, foregoing social intercourse with amiable men and women, and wrapping one's self in a mantle of traditional prejudice. President Porter, although a staunch defender of the existing college system, concedes its weakness. He says (p. 168): "It is no paradox to say that the first essay of the student's independence [i.e., the independence of college as contrasted with school] is often an act of prostrate subserviency to the opinion of the college community. This opinion he has little share in forming: he does little else than yield himself to the sentiment which he finds already formed.... It [this community] is eminently a law unto itself, making and enforcing such laws as no other community would recognize or understand--laws which are often strangely incongruous with the usually received commandments of God and man.... No community is swayed more completely by the force of public opinion. In none does public opinion solidify itself into so compact and homogeneous a force. Before its power the settled judgments of individual opinion are often abandoned or overborne, the sacred associations of childhood are relaxed, the plainest dictates of truth and honor are misinterpreted or defied."