The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
It occurs to me here that there is one subject on which I desire to
"give my views," though it is quite unconnected with Class-Day. But it
is probable that in the whole course of my natural life it will never
again happen to me to be writing about colleges, so I desire to say in
this paper everything I have to say on the subject. I refer to the
practice of "hazing," which is an abomination. If we should find it
among hinds, a remnant of the barbarisms of the Dark Ages, blindly
handed down by such slow-growing people as go to mill with their meal on
one side of the saddle and a stone on the other to balance, as their
fathers did, because it never occurred to their loggerheads to divide
the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should not be
surprised; but hazing occurs among boys who have been accustomed to the
circulation of ideas, boys old enough and intelligent enough to
understand the difference between brutality and frolic, old enough to
know what honor and courage mean, and therefore I cannot conceive how
they should countenance a practice which entirely ignores and defies
honor, and whose brutality has not a single redeeming feature. It has
neither wisdom nor wit, no spirit, no genius, no impulsiveness, scarcely
the mirth of boyish frolic. A narrow range of stale practical jokes,
lighted up by no gleam of originality, is transmitted from year to year
with as much fidelity as the Hebrew Bible, and not half the latitude
allowed to clergymen of the English Established Church. But besides its
platitude, its one overpowering and fatal characteristic is its intense
and essential cowardice. Cowardice is its head and front and bones and
blood. One boy does not single out another boy of his own weight, and
take his chances in a fair stand-up fight. But a party of Sophomores
club together in such numbers as to render opposition useless, and
pounce upon their victim unawares, as Brooks and his minions pounced
upon Sumner, and as the Southern chivalry is given to doing. For sweet
pity's sake, let this mode of warfare be monopolized by the Southern
chivalry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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