Those who know the difficulty of managing very large bodies of students will wonder inevitably, how the medieval universities, with their less formal and less complete organizations, succeeded in maintaining discipline for all these thousands of students. Most people will remember at once all the stories of roughness, of horse play, of drinking and gaming or worse that they have heard of the medieval students and will be apt to conclude that they are not to be wondered at after all, since it must have been practically impossible for the faculties of universities to keep order among such vast numbers. As a matter of fact, however, the story of the origin and maintenance of discipline in these universities is one of the most interesting features of university life. The process of discipline became in itself a very precious part of education, as it should be of course in any well regulated institution of learning. The very fact, moreover, that in spite of these large numbers and other factors that we shall call attention to in a moment, comparatively so few disgraceful stories of university life have come down to us, and the other and still more important fact that the universities could be kept so constantly at the attainment of their great purpose for such numbers, is itself a magnificent tribute to those who succeeded in doing it, and to the system which was gradually evolved, not by the faculty alone but by teachers and students for university government. With regard to the discipline of the medieval universities not much is known and considerable of what has been written on this obscure subject wears an unfavorable tinge, because it is unfortunately true that "the good men do is oft interred with {74} their bones" while the evil has an immortality all its own. The student escapades of the universities, the quarrels between town and gown, the stories of the evils apparently inevitable, where many young men are congregated--the hazing, the rough horse play, the carousing, the immoralities--have all come down to us, while it is easy to miss the supreme significance of the enthusiasm for learning that in these difficult times gathered so many students together from distant parts of the world, when traveling was so difficult and dangerous, and kept them at the universities for long years in spite of the hardships and inconveniences of the life. With regard to our modern universities the same thing is true, and the outside world knows much more of the escapades of the few, the little scandals of college life, that scarcely make a ripple but are so easily exaggerated, and so frequently repeated and lose nothing by repetition, the waste of time in athletics, in gambling, in social things, than of the earnest work and the successful intellectual progress and interests of the many. This should be quite enough to make the modern university man very slow to accept the supposed pictures of medieval student life, which