At this point I must beg the accomplished company of readers to recollect what an English college is. In its organization, and in much of its consequent _esprit du corps_, it is as different from an American college as an Odd-Fellows' lodge is from a country academy. The difference is also of precisely the same sort. The man or the boy who connects himself with an English college is, in theory, still the student of a thousand years ago, who came on foot to Oxford or Cambridge, because he had heard, in the wilds of Mercia or of Wessex, that there were some books at those places,--and that some Alfred or Ethelred or Eldred had given some privileges to students coming there. When he has arrived, he joins one or other of the societies of students whom he may find there, just as the Mercian Athelstan may have done. From the moment that the established society has tested him,--and the tests are very mild,--he is admitted as a member of a fraternity, sharing the privileges of that fraternity, and, to a certain extent, its duties. He is at first a junior member, it is true. Among his duties, therefore, will be obedience to some of the senior members, and respect to all. But none the less is he a neophyte member of a corporation which extends back hundreds of years perhaps,--he is a co-proprietor of its honors and privileges, is responsible for their preservation, and is, from the first, inoculated with its _esprit du corps_. Now in an American college there is _esprit du corps_ enough, and sense of college dignity enough. But the student's _esprit du corps_ is one thing, and the government's is another. The Commons Hall, for instance, has died out of most of our colleges. Why? Why, because it had ceased to be a _Commons_ Hall. It was not the place where the junior and senior members of a college, the pupils and all their instructors, met together. It was the place where the undergraduates were fed,--and where a few wretched tutors were fed at their sides. But every member of the governing body who could possibly escape did so. At our Cambridge, they even went so far as to set apart a Commons Hall for each class of undergraduates at last,--for fear men should see each other eat; as at "Separate Prisons" the idea of communion in worship is carried out by introducing each prisoner into a state-pew or royal-box whose partitions are so high that he cannot see his neighbors. This was before they gave the _coup-de-grace_ to the whole thing, and scattered the members of their college just as widely as they could at meal-times, as at all other times. The recitation, again, probably the only occasion when an American student meets his instructor, is conducted according to an arrangement by which the instructor meets all of a large section or class together, meeting them for recitation simply. In a word, the American college differs from any other American school chiefly in having larger endowments and older pupils.