An American at Oxford

When a freshman comes up to his college, he is received at the medi?val gate by a very modern porter, who lifts boxes and bags from the hansom in a most obliging manner, and is presently shown to his cloistral chambers by a friendly and urbane butler or steward. To accommodate the newcomers in the more populous colleges, a measure is resorted to so revolutionary that it shocks all American ideas of academic propriety. Enough seniors-fourth and third year men-are turned out of college to make room for the freshmen.

The assumption is that the upper classmen have had every opportunity to profit by the life of the college, and are prepared to flock by themselves in the town. Little communities of four or five fellows who have proved congenial live together in "diggings"-that is, in some townsman's house-hard by the college gate. This arrangement makes possible closer and more intimate relationship among them than would otherwise be likely; and after three years of the very free life within those sharded walls, a cloistered year outside is usually more than advisable, in view of the final examination. It cannot be said that they leave college without regret; but I never heard a word of complaint, and it is tacitly admitted that on the whole they profit by the arrangement.

The more substantial furnishings in the rooms are usually permanent, belonging to the college: each successive occupant is charged for interest on the investment and for depreciation by wear. Thus the furniture is far more comfortable than in an American college room and costs the occupant less. Bed and table linen, cutlery, and a few of the more personal furnishings the student brings himself. If one neglects to bring them, as I confess I did through ignorance, the deficiency is supplied by the scout, a dignitary in the employ of the college, who stands in somewhat more than the place of a servant and less than that of a parent to half a dozen fellows whose rooms are adjacent. The scout levies on the man above for sheets, on the man below for knives and forks, and on the man across the staircase for table linen. There is no call for shame on the one part or resentment on the other, for is not the scout the representative of the hospitality of the college? "When you have time, sir," he says kindly, "you will order your own linen and cutlery." How high a state of civilization is implied in this manner of receiving a freshman can be appreciated only by those who have arrived friendless at an American university.

The scout is in effect a porter, "goody," and eating-club waiter rolled into one. He has frequently a liberal dash of the don, which he has acquired by extended residence at the university; for among all the shifting generations of undergraduates, only he and the don are permanent. When he reaches middle age he wears a beard if he chooses, and then he is usually taken for a don by the casual visitor. There is no harm in this; the scout plays the part con amore, and his long breeding enables him to sustain it to a marvel. Yet for the most part the scout belongs with the world of undergraduates. He has his social clubs and his musical societies; he runs, plays cricket, and rows, and, finally, he meets the Cambridge scout in the inter-varsity matches. His pay the scout receives in part from the college, but mostly from the students, who give him two to four pounds a term each, according to his deserts. All broken bread, meat, and wine are his perquisites, and tradition allows him to "bag" a fair amount of tea, coffee, and sugar. Out of all this he makes a sumptuous living. I knew only one exception, and that was when four out of six men on a certain scout's staircase happened to be vegetarians, and five teetotalers. The poor fellow was in extremities for meat and in desperation for drink. There was only one more pitiable sight in college, and that was the sole student on the staircase who ate meat and drank wine; the scout bagged food and drink from him ceaselessly. At the end of one term the student left a half dozen bottles of sherry, which he had merely tasted, in his sideboard; and when he came back it was gone. "Where's my sherry, Betts?" he asked. "Sherry, sir? you ain't got no sherry." "But I left six bottles; you had no right to more than the one that was broken." "Yes, sir; but when I had taken that, sir, the 'arf dozen was broke." According to Oxford traditions the student had no recourse; and be it set down to his praise, he never blamed the scout. He bemoaned the fate that bound them together in suffering, and vented his spleen on total abstinence and vegetarianism. It may be supposed that the scout's antiquity and importance makes him a bad servant; in the land of the free I fear that it would; but at Oxford nothing could be more unlikely. The only mark that distinguishes the scout from any other class of waiters is that his attentions to your comfort are carried off with greater ease and dignity. It may be true that he is president of the Oxford Society of College Servants-the Bones or the Hasty Pudding of the scouts; that he stroked the scouts' eight in the townie's bumping races, during the long vac, and afterward rowed against the scouts' eight from Cambridge; that he captained the scouts' cricket eleven; that in consequence he is a "double blue" and wears the Oxford 'varsity color on his hat with no less pride than any other "blue." Yet he is all the more bound, out of consideration for his own dignity, to show you every respect and attention.

After the scout, the hosts of the college are the dons. As soon as the freshman is settled in his rooms, or sometimes even before, his tutor meets him and arranges for a formal presentation to the dean and master. All three are apt to show their interest in a freshman by advising him as to trying for the athletic teams, joining the college clubs and societies, and in a word as to all the concerns of undergraduate life except his studies-these come later. If a man has any particular gift, athletic or otherwise, the tutor introduces him to the men he should know, or, when this is not feasible, gives a word to the upper classmen, who take the matter into their own hands. If a freshman has no especial gift, the tutor is quite as sure to say the proper word to the fellows who have most talent for drawing out newcomers.

In the first weeks of a freshman's residence he finds sundry pasteboards tucked beneath his door: the upper classman's call is never more than the formal dropping of a card. The freshman is expected to return these calls at once, and is debarred by a happy custom from leaving his card if he does not find his man. He goes again and again until he does find him. By direct introduction from the tutor or by this formality of calling, the freshman soon meets half a dozen upper classmen, generally second-year men, and in due time he receives little notes like this:-

Dear Smith,-Come to my rooms if you can to breakfast with Brown and me on Wednesday at 8.30.

Yours sincerely,

A. Robinson.

At table the freshman finds other freshmen whose interests are presumably similar to his own.

No one supposes for a moment that all this is done out of simple human kindness. The freshman breakfast is a conventional institution for gathering together the unlicked cubs, so that the local influences may take hold of them. The reputation of the college in general demands that it keep up a name for hospitality; and in particular the clubs and athletic teams find it of advantage to get the run of all available new material. The freshman breakfast is nothing in the world but a variation of the "running" that is given newcomers in those American colleges where fraternity life is strong, and might even be regarded as a more civilized form of the rushes and cane sprees and even hazings that used to serve with us to introduce newcomers to their seniors. Many second-year breakfasts are perfunctory enough; the host has a truly British air of saying that since for better or for worse he is destined to look upon your face and abide by your deeds, he is willing to make the best of it. If you prove a "bounder," you are soon enough dropped. "I shall soon be a second-year man," I once heard a freshman remark, "and then I can ask freshmen to breakfast, too, and cut them afterward." The point is that every fellow is thrown in the way of meeting the men of his year. If one is neglected in the end, he has no reason to feel that it is the fault of the college. As a result of this machinery for initiating newcomers, a man usually ceases to be a freshman after a single term (two months) of residence; and it is always assumed that he does.

In the evening, when the season permits, the fellows sit out of doors after dinner, smoking and playing bowls. There is no place in which the spring comes more sweetly than in an Oxford garden. The high walls are at once a trap for the first warm rays of the sun and a barrier against the winds of March. The daffodils and crocuses spring up with joy as the gardener bids; and the apple and cherry trees coddle against the warm north walls, spreading out their early buds gratefully to the mild English sun.

For long, quiet hours after dinner they flaunt their beauty to the fellows smoking, and breathe their sweetness to the fellows playing bowls. "No man," exclaims the American visitor, "could live four years in these gardens of delight and not be made gentler and nobler!" Perhaps! though not altogether in the way the visitor imagines. When the flush of summer is on, the loiterers loll on the lawn full length; and as they watch the insects crawl among the grass they make bets on them, just as the gravest and most reverend seniors have been known to do in America.

In the windows overlooking the quadrangle are boxes of brilliant flowers, above which the smoke of a pipe comes curling out. At Harvard some fellows have geraniums in their windows, but only the very rich; and when they began the custom an ancient graduate wrote one of those communications to the "Crimson," saying that if men put unmanly boxes of flowers in the window, how can they expect to beat Yale? Flower boxes, no sand. At Oxford they manage things so that anybody may have flower boxes; and their associations are by no means unmanly. This is the way they do it. In the early summer a gardener's wagon from the country draws up by the college gate, and the driver cries, "Flowers! Flowers for a pair of old bags, sir." Bags is of course the fitting term for English trousers-which don't fit; and I should like to inform that ancient graduate that the window boxes of Oxford suggest the very badge of manhood.

As long as the English twilight lingers, the men will sit and talk and sing to the mandolin; and I have heard of fellows sitting and talking all night, not turning in until the porter appeared to take their names at roll-call. On the eve of May day it is quite the custom to sit out, for at dawn one may go to see the pretty ceremony of heralding the May on Magdalen Tower. The Magdalen choir boys-the sweetest songsters in all Oxford-mount to the top of that most beautiful of Gothic towers, and, standing among the pinnacles,-pinnacles afire with the spirituality of the Middle Ages, that warms all the senses with purity and beauty,-those boys, I say, on that tower and among those pinnacles, open their mouths and sing a Latin song to greet the May. Meantime, the fellows who have come out to listen in the street below make catcalls and blow fish horns. The song above is the survival of a Romish, perhaps a Druidical, custom; the racket below is the survival of a Puritan protest. That is Oxford in symbol! Its dignity and mellowness are not so much a matter of flowering gardens and crumbling walls as of the traditions of the centuries in which the whole life of the place has deep sources; and the noblest of its institutions are fringed with survivals that run riot in the grotesque.

MAGDALEN TOWER FROM THE BRIDGE

If a man intends to spend the evening out of college, he has to make a dash before nine o'clock; for love or for money the porter may not let an inmate out after nine. One man I knew was able to escape by guile. He had a brother in Trinity whom he very much resembled, and whenever he wanted to go out, he would tilt his mortarboard forward, wrap his gown high about his neck, as it is usually worn of an evening, and bidding the porter a polite good-night, say, "Charge me to my brother, Hancock, if you please." The charge is the inconsiderable sum of one penny, and is the penalty of having a late guest. Having profited by my experience with the similar charge for keeping my name on the college books, I never asked its why and wherefore. Both are no doubt survivals of some medi?val custom, the authority of which no college employee-or don, for the matter of that-would question. Such matters interest the Oxford man quite as little as the question how he comes by a tonsil or a vermiform appendix. They are there, and he makes the best of them.

If a fellow leaves college for an evening, it is for a foregathering at some other college, or to go to the theatre. As a rule he wears a cloth cap. A "billycock" or "bowler," as the pot hat is called, is as thoroughly frowned on now in English colleges as it was with us a dozen years ago. As for the mortarboard and gown, undergraduate opinion rather requires that they be left behind. This is largely, no doubt, because they are required by law to be worn. So far as the undergraduates are concerned, every operative statute of the university, with the exception of those relating to matriculation and graduation, refers to conduct in the streets after nightfall, and almost without exception they are honored in the breach. This is out of disregard for the Vice-Chancellor of the university, who is familiarly called the Vice, because he serves as a warning to others for the practice of virtue. The Vice makes his power felt in characteristically dark and tortuous ways. His factors are two proctors, college dons in daytime, but skulkers after nightfall, each of whom has his bulldogs, that is, scouts employed literally to spy upon the students. If these catch you without cap or gown, they cause you to be proctorized or "progged," as it is called, which involves a matter of five shillings or so. As a rule there is little danger of progging, but my first term fell in evil days. For some reason or other the chest of the university showed a deficit of sundry pounds, shillings, and pence; and as it had long ceased to need or receive regular bequests,-the finance of the institution being in the hands of the colleges,-a crisis was at hand. A more serious problem had doubtless never arisen since the great question was solved of keeping undergraduates' names on the books. The expedient of the Vice-Chancellor was to summon the proctors, and bid them charge their bulldogs to prog all freshmen caught at night without cap and gown. The deficit in the university chest was made up at five shillings a head.

One of the Vice-Chancellor's rules is that no undergraduate shall enter an Oxford "pub." Now the only restaurant in town, Queen's, is run in conjunction with a pub, and was once the favorite resort of all who were bent on breaking the monotony of an English Sunday. The Vice-Chancellor resolved to destroy this den of Sabbath-breaking, and the undergraduates resolved no less firmly to defend their stronghold. The result was a hand-to-hand fight with the bulldogs, which ended so triumphantly for the undergraduates that a dozen or more of them were sent down. In the articles of the peace that followed, it was stipulated, I was told, that so long as the restaurant was closed Sunday afternoons and nights, it should never suffer from the visit of proctor or bulldog. As a result, Queen's is a great scene of undergraduate foregatherings. The dinners are good enough and reasonably cheap; and as most excellent champagne is to be had at twelve shillings the bottle, the diners are not unlikely to get back to college a trifle buffy, in the Oxford phrase.

By an interesting survival of medi?val custom, the Vice-Chancellor has supreme power over the morals of the town, and any citizen who transgresses his laws is visited with summary punishment. For a tradesman or publican to assist in breaking university rules means outlawry and ruin, and for certain offenses a citizen may be punished by imprisonment. Over the Oxford theatre the Vice-Chancellor's power is absolute. In my time he was much more solicitous that the undergraduate be kept from knowledge of the omnipresent woman with a past than that dramatic art should flourish, and forbade the town to more than one excellent play of the modern school of comedy that had been seen and discussed in London by the younger sisters of the undergraduates. The woman with a present is virtually absent.

Time was when no Oxford play was quite successful unless the undergraduates assisted at its first night, though in a way very different from that which the term denotes in France. The assistance was of the kind so generously rendered in New York and Boston on the evening of an athletic contest. Even to-day, just for tradition's sake, the undergraduates sometimes make a row. A lot of B. N. C. men, as the clanny sons of Brazenose College call themselves, may insist that an opera stop while the troupe listen to one of their own excellent vocal performances; and I once saw a great sprinter, not unknown to Yale men, rise from his seat, face the audience, and, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at the soubrette, announce impressively, "Do you know, I rather like that girl!" The show is usually over just before eleven, and then occurs an amusing, if unseemly, scramble to get back to college before the hour strikes. A man who stays out after ten is fined threepence; after eleven the fine is sixpence. When all is said, why shouldn't one sprint for threepence?

If you stay out of college after midnight, the dean makes a star chamber offense of it, fines you a "quid" or two, and like as not sends you down. This sounds a trifle worse than it is; for if you must be away, your absence can usually be arranged for. If you find yourself in the streets after twelve, you may rap on some friend's bedroom window and tell him of your plight through the iron grating. He will then spend the first half of the night in your bed and wash his hands in your bowl. With such evidence as this to support him, the scout is not apt, if sufficiently retained, to report a suspected absence. I have even known fellows to make their arrangements in advance and spend the night in town; but the ruse has its dangers, and the penalty is to be sent down for good and all.

It is owing to such regulations as these that life in the English college has the name of being cloistral. Just how cloistral it is in spirit no one can know who has not taken part in a rag in the quad; and this is impossible to an outsider, for at midnight all visitors are required to leave, under a heavy penalty to their host.

Any jubilation is a rag; but the most interesting kind, though perhaps the least frequent, takes the direction of what we call hazing. It is seldom, however, as hazing has come to be with us, a wanton outbreak. It is a deliberate expression of public opinion, and is carried on sedately by the leading men of the college. The more I saw of it, the more deeply I came to respect it as an institution.

In its simplest if rarest form it merely consists in smashing up a man's room. The only affair of this kind which I saw took place in the owner's absence; and when I animadverted on the fact, I was assured that it would have turned out much worse for the man's feelings if he had been present. He was a strapping big Rugbeian, who had come up with a "reputter," or reputation, as a football player, and had insisted on trying first off for the 'varsity fifteen. He had promptly been given the hoof for being slow and lazy, and when he condescended to try for the college fifteen, his services were speedily dispensed with for the same reason. As he still carried his head high, it was necessary to bring his shortcomings home to him in an unmistakable manner. Brutal as I thought the proceeding, and shameful to grown men, it did him good. He became a hard-working and lowly minded athlete, and prospered. I am not prepared to say that the effect in this particular instance did not justify the means.

A series of judicial raggings was much more edifying. Having pulled their culprit out of bed after midnight, the upper classmen set him upon his window-seat in pyjamas, and with great solemnity appointed a judge, a counsel for the prosecution, and a counsel for the defense. Of the charges against him only one or two struck home, and even these were so mingled with the nonsense of the proceedings that their sting was more or less blunted. The man had been given over to his books to the neglect of his personal appearance. It was charged that in pretending to know his subjunctives he was ministering to the vanity of the dean, who had written a Latin grammar, and that by displaying familiarity with Hegel he was boot-licking the master, who was a recently imported Scotch philosopher. Then the vital question was raised as to the culprit's personal habits. Heaven defend him now from his legal defender! It was urged that as he was a student of Liter? Humaniores, he might be excused from an acquaintance with the scientific commodity known as H2O: one might ignore anything, in fact, if only one were interested in Liter? Humaniores. By such means as this the face of the college is kept bright and shining.

Here is a round robin, addressed to the best of fellows, a member of the 'varsity shooting team and golf team. He was a Scotchman by birth and by profession, and even his schoolboy days at Eton had not divested him of a Highland gait.

"Whereas, Thomas Rankeillor, Gent, of the University of Oxford, has, by means of his large feet, uncouth gait, and his unwieldy brogues, wantonly and with malice destroyed, mutilated, and otherwise injured the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally, the property of the Oxford University Golf Club, whereof he is a member, and

"Whereas, 2, The said Thomas Rankeillor, etc., has by these large feet, uncouth gait, and unwieldy brogues aforesaid, raised embankments, groins, and other bunkers, hazards, and impediments, formed unnecessary roads, farm roads, bridle paths, and other roads, on the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally, aforesaid; excavated sundry and diverse reservoirs, tanks, ponds, conduits, sewers, channels, and other runnels, needlessly irrigating the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally aforesaid, and

"Whereas, 3, The said Thomas Rankeillor, etc., has by those large feet, uncouth gait, and unwieldy brogues aforesaid, caused landslips, thus demolishing all natural hills, bunkers, and other excrescences, and all artificial hillocks, mounds, hedges, and other hazards,

"Hereby we, the circumsigned, do request, petition, and otherwise entreat the aforesaid

"Thomas Rankeillor, Gent, of the University of Oxford, to alter, transform, and otherwise modify his uncouth gait, carriage, and general mode of progression; to buy, purchase, or otherwise acquire boots, shoes, and all other understandings of reasonable size, weight, and material; and finally that he do cease from this time forward to wear, use, or in any way carry the aforesaid brogues.

"Given forth this the 17th day of March, 1896."

At times rougher means are employed. At Brazenose there happened to be two men by the same name, let us say, of Gaylor, one of whom had made himself agreeable to the college, while the other had decidedly not. One midnight a party of roisterers hauled the unpopular Gaylor out of his study, pulled off his bags, and dragged him by the heels a lap or two about the quad. This form of discipline has since been practiced in other colleges, and is called debagging. The popular Gaylor was ever afterward distinguished by the name of Asher, because, according to the Book of Judges, Asher abode in his breaches.

Not dissimilar correctives may be employed, in extreme need, against those mightiest in authority. A favorite device is to screw the oak of an objectionable don. Mr. Andrew Lang, himself formerly a don at Merton, reports a conversation-can it have been a personal experience?-between a don standing inside a newly screwed oak and his scout, who was tendering sympathy from the staircase. "What am I to do?" cried the don. "Mr. Muff, sir," suggested the scout, "when 'e's screwed up, sir, 'e sends for the blacksmith." At Christ Church, "The House," as it is familiarly called, much more direct and personal methods have been employed. Not many years ago a censor (whose office is that of the dean at other colleges) stirred up unusual ill-will among his wards. They pulled him from his bed, dragged him into Tom Quad,-Wolsey's Quad,-and threw him bodily among the venerable carp of the Mercury Pond. Then they gathered about in a circle, and, when he raised his head above the surface, thrust him under with their walking-sticks. Something like forty of them were sent down for this, and the censor went traveling for his health.

The memory of this episode was still green when the Duke of Marlborough gave a coming of age ball at Blenheim Palace, and invited over literally hundreds of his Oxford friends. In other colleges the undergraduates were permitted to leave Oxford for the night, but at the House the censor stipulated that they be within the gates, as usual, by midnight. This would have meant a break-neck drive of eight miles after about fifteen minutes at the ball, and was far more exasperating to the young Britons than a straightforward refusal. That evening the dons sported their oaks, and carefully bolted themselves within. The night passed in so deep a silence that, for all they knew, the ghost of Wolsey might have been stalking in his cherished quadrangle, the glory of building which the Eighth Henry so unfeelingly appropriated. As morning dawned, the common-room gossips will tell you, the dons crawled furtively out of bed, and shot their bolts to find whether they had need of the blacksmith. Not a screw had been driven. The morning showed why. On the stately walls of Tom Quad was painted "Damn the Dons!" and again in capital letters, "Damn the Dons!" and a third time, in larger capitals, "Damn the Dons!" There were other inscriptions, less fit to relate; and stretching along one whole side of the quad, in huge characters, the finely antithetical sentence: "God bless the Duke of Marlborough." The doors of the dean's residence were smeared with red paint; and against a marble statue of the late Dean Liddell, the Greek lexicographer, a bottle of green ink had been smashed. Two hundred workmen, summoned from a neighboring building, labored two days with rice-root brushes and fuller's earth, but with so little effect that certain of the stones had to be replaced in the walls, and endless scrubbings failed to overcome the affinity between the ink and the literary Liddell. The marble statue has been replaced by one of plaster.

Compared with the usual Oxford rag, the upsetting of Professor Silliman's statue in the Yale campus by means of a lasso dwindles into insignificance, and the painting of 'varsity stockings on John Harvard, which so scandalized the undergraduates that they repaired the damage by voluntary subscriptions, might be regarded as an act of filial piety.

The more I learned of Oxford motives, the less anxious I was to censure the system of ragging. In an article I wrote after only a few months' stay, I spoke of it as boyish and undignified; and most Americans, I feel sure, would likewise hold up the hand of public horror. Yet I cannot be wholly thankful that we are not as they. To the undergraduates, ragging is a survival of the excellently efficient system of discipline in the public schools, where the older boys have charge of the manners and morals of the younger; and historically, like public school discipline, it is an inheritance from the prehistoric past. In the Middle Ages it was apparently the custom to hold the victim's nose literally to the grindstone. In the schools, to be sure, the Sixth Form take their duties with great sobriety of conscience-which is not altogether the case in college; but the difference of spirit is perhaps justifiable. For a properly authorized committee of big schoolboys to chastise a youngster who has transgressed is not unnatural, and the system that provides for it has proved successful for five centuries; but for men to adopt the same attitude towards a fellow only a year or two their junior would be preposterous. Horseplay is a necessary part of the game. The end in both is the same: it is to bring each individual under the influence of the traditions and standards of the institution of which he has elected to be a part. Just as the system of breakfasting freshmen is by no means as altruistic as it at first appears, the practice of ragging is by no means as brutal. It is as if the college said: We have admitted you and welcomed you, opening up the way to every avenue of enjoyment and profit, and it is for our common good, sir, that you be told of your shortcomings. The most diligent and distinguished scholar is not unlikely to be most in need of a pointed lesson in personal decorum; and the man who was not Asher may be thankful all his life for the bad quarter of an hour that taught him the difference between those who do and those who do not abide in their breaches.

With regard to the dons, a similar case might be made. Any one who assumes an authority over grown men that is so nearly absolute should be held to strict honesty and justice of dealing. So far as I could learn, the Christ Church dons who were so severely dealt with were both unjust and insincere, and I came to sympathize in some measure with the undergraduates at the House, who were half humorously inclined to regard the forty outcasts as martyrs.

This is not to argue that all American hazing is justifiable. In many cases, especially of late years, it has been as silly and brutal as the most puritanical moralists have declared. To steal the Louisburg Cross from above the door of the Harvard Library was vandalism if you wish-it was certainly a very stupid proceeding; and to celebrate a really notable athletic victory by mutilating the pedestal of the statue of John Harvard was not only stupid, but unworthy of a true sportsman. How much better to make an end with painting 'varsity stockings on the dear old boy's bronze legs, and leave the goody to wash them off next day. What I wish to point out is that where there is vigorous public spirit, it may be more efficiently expressed by hazing than by a very nor'easter of Puritan morality.

A tradition of the late master of Balliol, Jowett, the great humanist, would seem to show that he held some such opinion. It was his custom in his declining years to walk after breakfast in the garden quad, and whenever there were evidences of a rag, even to the extent of broken windows, he would say cheerily to his fidus Achates, "Ah, Hardie, the mind of the college is still vigorous; it has been expressing itself." The best possible justification of the cloistral restrictions of English college life is the facility with which the mind of the college expresses itself. It is by no means fantastic to hint that the decline of well-considered hazing in American colleges has come step by step with the breaking up of the bonds of hospitality and comradeship that used to make them well-organized social communities.

I have not come to this philosophy without deep experience. On one occasion after Hall, I was flown with such insolence against college restrictions that the cheval-de-frise above the back gate seemed an affront to a freeborn American. Though the porter's gate was still open, it was imperatively necessary to scale that roller of iron spikes. I was no sooner astride of it than a mob of townspeople gathered without, and among them a palsied beggar, who bellowed out that he would hextricate me for 'arf a crown, sir. I have seldom been in a less gratifying position; and when I had clambered back into college, I ruefully recalled the explanation my tutor had given me of the iron spikes and bottle shards,-an explanation that at the time had shaken my sides with laughter at British absurdity. My tutor had said that if the fellows were allowed to rag each other in the open streets and smash the townspeople's windows, the matter would be sure to get into the papers and set the uninitiated parent against the universities. In effect, the iron spikes and the stumps of bottles are admirable, not so much because they keep the undergraduate in, as because they keep the public out; and since the public includes all people who wish to hextricate you for 'arf a crown, sir, my mind was in a way to be reduced to that British state of illogic in which I regarded only the effect.

As a last resort I carefully sounded the undergraduates as to whether they would find use for greater liberty. They were not only content with their lot, but would, I found, resent any loosening of the restrictions. To give them the liberty of London at night or even of Oxford, they argued, would tend to break up the college as a social organization and thus to weaken it athletically; for at Oxford they understand what we sometimes do not, that a successful cultivation of sports goes hand in hand with good comradeship and mutual loyalty.

The only question remaining was of the actual moral results of the semi-cloistral life. Such outbreaks of public opinion as I have described are at the worst exceptional; they are the last resort of outraged patience. The affair at Christ Church is unexampled in modern times. Many a man of the better sort goes through his four years at the university without either experiencing or witnessing undergraduate violence. As for drinking, in spite of the fact that wine and spirits are sold to undergraduates by the college at any and all times and in any and all quantities, there seemed to be less excessive indulgence than, for instance, at Harvard or at Yale. And the fact that what there was took place for the most part within the college walls was in many respects most fortunate. When fellows are turned loose for their jubilations amid the vices of a city, as is usually the case with us, the consequences to their general morality are sometimes the most hideous. In an English college the men to whom immorality seems inevitable-and such are to be found in all communities-have recourse to London. But as their expeditions take place in daylight and cold blood, and are, except at great risk, cut short when the last evening train leaves Paddington shortly after dinner, it is not possible to carry them off with that dazzling air of the man of the world that in America lures so many silly freshmen into dissipations for which they have no natural inclination. This little liberty is apparently of great value. The cloistral vice, which seems inevitable in the English public schools, is robbed of any shadow of palliation. A fellow who continues it is thought puerile, if nothing worse. When it exists, it is more likely to be the result of the intimate study of the ancient classics, and is then even more looked down upon by the robust Briton as effeminate or decadent. The subject, usually difficult or impossible to investigate, happened to be on the surface at the time of my residence because of the sensational trial of an Oxford graduate in London. I was satisfied that the general body of undergraduates was quite free of contamination. On the whole, I should say that the restrictions of college life in England are far less dangerous than the absolute freedom of life in an American college. Under our system a few men profit greatly; they leave college experienced in the ways of the world and at the same time thoroughly masters of themselves. But it is a strong man-perhaps a blasphemous one-that would ask to be led into temptation. The best system of college residence, I take it, is that which develops thoroughly and spontaneously the normal social instincts, and at the same time leaves men free moral agents. In a rightly constituted fellow, in fact, the normal social life constitutes the only real freedom. Those frowning college walls, which we are disposed to regard as instruments of pedagogical tyranny, are the means of nourishing the normal social life, and are thus in effect the bulwarks of a freer system than is known to American universities.