College tradition adds its distinctive and forceful factor to the campus life of the undergraduate, particularly in the older seats of learning. A good tradition makes it easy to accomplish things worth while without the spasmodic campaigns that characterize many younger institutions. Students are often more zealous to uphold the ancient customs of their college than anything else connected with it. The annual conflicts between freshmen and sophomores have become a part of the institution. Certain traditional habits, often humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, have grown up in nearly every North American college. An old account of life at Cambridge tells of the manner in which both occupant and furniture of a freshman’s room were menaced by a missile as big as a cantaloupe that was thrown into it. It was described as a _transmittendam_ (it went with the room), and was handed down in some such forcible manner from one generation of freshmen to another. The desire to link the past with the present at Harvard is also shown in the custom of registering the name of each occupant on the doors of certain old frame buildings long used as lodging-houses by students. The old college pump has been a traditional means of grace to many freshmen, and the customary restriction to upper classmen of caps, canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to undergraduate life. College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied opportunity. The students of the Middle West and the Far West are more sensible of their freedom from the past than are our Eastern undergraduates. They realize that they are at least a hundred years behind Eastern colleges in the dignity of their traditions, and they therefore seek to crystallize college spirit about college customs; but their customs do not interfere with progress, as sometimes happens in the East, and a question is decided on its merits quite regardless of precedent or policies. If a proposition seems sensible and right, it is adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with tradition. Keeping close to modern needs, those colleges have gone ahead and accomplished things while more conservative institutions have been leisurely thinking about them. It is this audacity of spirit, this dash and action, which endear to the undergraduates of the West all men of achievement. When among them one thinks of the old verse: