The “occasional insurrections of the young men” were a feature of the college from the beginning. Sydney Smith writes to Lord Holland in June 1810, when there was talk of making Mackintosh professor at Haileybury: “The season for lapidating the professors is now at hand; keep Mackintosh quiet at Holland House till all is over;”[1019] and to Whishaw in January 1818, when the appointment had been made: “His situation at Hertford will suit him very well, peltings and contusions always excepted. He should stipulate for ‘pebble money,’ as it is technically termed, or an annual pension in case he is disabled by the pelting of the students. By the bye, might it not be advisable for the professors to learn the use of the sling (_balearia habena_)? It would give them a great advantage over the students.”[1020] The lapidations were probably no worse than similar scenes at our English and Scotch Universities that have not yet destroyed the credit of these institutions. But the opponents of the college complained of much more than the insubordination of the students. Lord Grenville had made an attack on it (in April 1813), on the ground that it separated the future Civil servants from the ordinary life of Englishmen, and prevented them from becoming imbued with “English manners, English attachments, English principles, and I am not ashamed to say English prejudices.”[1021] Malthus, who had gone up to London to hear Grenville’s speech in the House of Lords, became champion of the college, and had no difficulty in meeting this assault. The defence of the professors, as set forth by him in 1817,[1022] was that the plan of the college was good in theory and had proved good in practice. The insubordination was due to the dependence of the professorial staff upon the Company’s Directors, who had (till then) withheld from the teachers their best means of discipline, the power of expulsion.