“It is certain that there are old college customs still lingering in our country which people generally are now anxious to be rid of. Some of them are offsets of the abominable practices of old English schools, and have come down from colonial days, through successive generations. Thus American hazing is a modification of English fagging. It seems that there are still some who defend or palliate the crime--for such it is. They say that it stirs up courage and promotes manliness. But I should like to know what courage there is in a crowd, in masks at the dead of night, attacking a single youth who is gagged and is defenceless! It is not a fair and open fight in which both parties expose themselves to danger. The deed, so far from being courageous, is about the lowest form of cowardice. The preparations made and the deeds done are in all cases mean and dastardly, and in some horrid. I have seen the apparatus. There are masks for concealment, and gags to stop the mouth and ears; there is a razor and there are scissors, there are ropes to bind, and in some cases whips or boards to inflict blows; there are commonly filthy applications ready, and in all cases unmanly insults more difficult to be borne by a youth of spirit than any beating. The practice, so far from being humanizing, is simply brutalizing in its influence on all engaged in it. It does not form the brave man, but the bully. The youth exposed to the indignity this year is prepared to revenge it on another next year. A gentleman who knows American colleges well tells me that in those in which hazing is common in the younger classes the very look of the students is rowdyish. It is astonishing that the American people, firm enough when they are roused, should have allowed this barbarity to linger in our colleges, great and small, down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century of the religion of purity and love.” Our universities and more progressive colleges are slowly but surely reshaping themselves on the lines indicated in the foregoing pages, and the time is not far distant when no graduate can be excused for being merely book-stuffed instead of educated. CHAPTER XXVI. OUR GREAT CONCERN. Ours is the greatest land in the world, and we, the people of these United States, ought to be the greatest people. At the present time it does not require any great amount of conceit to make us believe that we are superior to our neighbors, but it will not do to forget that the faculty of being up and growing is not one of which we have a monopoly. One of the founders of the Republic said: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He might have added that it is the price of pretty much everything else worth having and keeping.