"Every schoolboy and every college student in his upward way to real manhood represents the evolution of a primitive savage into a civilized being. Every school and college reproduces the developmental process of a human society in some of its most interesting aspects, such as government and law. There are all stages of social development in the student class, from actual savagery, which frequently crops out in the very best schools and colleges, to effeminate forms of modern civilization. There are all degrees of institutional government, from total anarchy and patriarchal despotism to Roman imperialism and constitutional government; although it must be admitted that self-government among the student class--said to obtain in some American schools and colleges--is not yet a chartered right. The regulation of student society by itself, or by all the powers that be, presents all phases of judicature, from the most savage ordeals to the most humane. Student customs are full of ancient survivals, and some editions of 'College Laws' are almost as archaic as the Code of Manu. One of these days we shall perhaps find men investigating college jurisprudence, college government, and college politics from the comparative point of view, and writing the natural history of the student class" (272. 3). In the community of the sand-pile studied by Dr. Hall, "a general habit of settling disputes, often brought to issue with fists, by means of meetings and specifications, arose." There is room for a volume on the jurisprudence of childhood and youth, and every page would be of intensest interest and of value in the history of the evolution of the ideas of justice in the human race. CHAPTER XX. THE CHILD AS ORACLE-KEEPER AND ORACLE- INTERPRETER. Enfants et fous sont devins [Children and fools are soothsayers]. --_French Proverb._ Children pick up words as chickens peas, And utter them again as God shall please.--_English Proverb_. The fresh face of a child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable seer.--_Novalis_. _Child-Oracles_. "Children and fools speak the truth," says an old and wide-spread proverb, and another version includes him who is drunken, making a trinity of truth-tellers. In like manner have the frenzy of wine and the madness of the gods been associated in every age with oracle and sign, and into this oracular trinity enters also the child. Said De Quincey: "God speaks to children also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in darkness," and the poet Stoddard has clothed in exquisite language a similar thought:-- "Nearer the gate of Paradise than we, Our children breathe its air, its angels see; And when they pray, God hears their simple prayer, Yea, even sheathes his sword in judgment bare."