I have said that reward and punishment by the college authorities, or by M. de Fellenberg, their head, were virtually excluded from this system. Considering the heterogeneous materials that were collected together from half the nations of the world, some having been nursed and petted in the lap of aristocracy, and others, probably, sent thither because their parents could not manage them at home,--considering, too, the comparatively late age at which students enter such a college, many of them just from schools where severity was the rule and artificial reward the stimulant,--considering all this, I doubt whether the mild, uncoercing, paternal government of Hofwyl would have been a success, but for the peculiarity here referred to coming in aid of our teachers, and supplying motives and restraints to ourselves. It was in this wise. Hofwyl was not only an institution for education, it was also an independent, self-governing community. It had its code of laws, its council of legislation, its court of judges, its civil and military officers, its public treasury. It had its annual elections, by ballot, at which each student had a vote,--its privileges, equally accessible to all,--its labors and duties, in which all took a share. It proposed and debated and enacted its own laws, from time to time modifying them, but not often nor radically. It acted independently of the professors, and of Fellenberg himself, except that our foster-father (_Pflegevater_, as we used to call him) retained a veto, which, however, like Queen Victoria, he never exercised. Never, I think, were laws framed with a more single eye to the public good, or more strictly obeyed by those who framed them. Nor was this an unwilling obedience, an eye-service constrained by fear or force. It was given cheerfully, honestly. We had ourselves assisted in framing, and given our votes in enacting, our code of laws. We felt them to be our own, and as such it became a point of honor with us to conform to them in spirit as in letter. I know not whether the idea of this juvenile self-regulating republic (_Verein_, we called it) originated with Fellenberg or with some of the students; but, whatever its origin, I believe it to have been the chief lever that raised the moral and social character of our college to the height it ultimately attained. It gave birth to public spirit, and to social and civic virtues. It nurtured a conscious independence, that submitted with pleasure to what it knew to be the will of the whole, and felt itself bound to submit to nothing else. It created young republicans, and awakened in them that devotion to the public welfare and that zeal for the public good, which we seek too often, alas, in vain, in older, but not wiser, communities.