his pupils from unwillingness to admit that he is fallible.

The cultivation of openness on both sides is closely connected with what seems the slowness of some reforms in our larger colleges. A slow reform is much better than an evaded or violated prohibition; and the choice is often between these two. The policy of Harvard University, for example, is to test everything by daylight. Instead of forbidding certain initiation practices, which it believes to be foolish and occasionally cruel, but which it knows no power could stop if the societies were secret societies, it does all it can to lead the societies into publicity, so that even the initiations may stand public scrutiny. Public opinion has already, in the better colleges, suppressed hazing. The authorities can seldom suppress it: they can merely clean up afterward; and often they may send away the wrong men.

As an example of open relation be

tween administrative officers and students, I give you a dialogue that occurred in a strong Quaker college. "Jones," said the president, who wastes few words, "I have reason to believe thee is a thief and a liar." "No, Mr. President," said Jones, "I am a liar; but I am not a thief." (It is interesting, by the way, to consider where this leaves Jones.) Above all things, a college officer should try not to be the kind of man of whom the late Dr. Carroll Everett said, "He presents different aspects of a truth to different persons." I cannot say with Mark Twain that I know honesty to be the best policy because I have tried both; but I know it to be the best policy because I have seen both. In a college that employs no spies, the student himself is treated as the greatest living authority on his own conduct; and, when he is questioned about it, he is expected, as a gentleman, to tell the truth. "Is it fair," people sometimes ask, "this

expecting a man to bear witness against himself?" Much fairer than expecting others to bear witness against him. He understands the right of the college to call him to account. Again and again I have marvelled at the frankness of students when squarely asked what they have or have not done, at the persistency of the feeling that, even if they have cheated more or less, they cannot, as gentlemen, lie when talking face to face. Of course there are exceptions, often in part the fault of the college officer or the result of his want of tact; yet in general, the frankness of students, even in bad things, is refreshing. Not long since, a man whose college work was done but who had not yet his degree said to me, "I must leave this place. I have got in with fellows who have more money than I and live more expensively than I; and I have taken to drinking. I must get out into the country." "Temptation," as Thackeray says, "is an ob

sequious servant, who has no objections to the country;" but this man's immediate temptation lay among certain city associates. "I had been drinking too much," said another student, "and when the proctor spoke to me I think I insulted him. I don't know what I said; I only know that at the time it appeared to me amusing." Another student, who wished to go away for a recess a day earlier than the college rules allowed, remarked, "It's only cutting one lecture." When I explained the difficulty of keeping men till the end of the term, and the principle involved in letting a single one go, he exclaimed, "But the lecture's in such a darned silly course!" an improper remark, no doubt; yet the fact that he spoke out went far toward making up for the impropriety.

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said of his own college days that a student seen walking with an instructor lost caste at once. There has

been no more important change in college life of late than the change in the relation of student and instructor. In nearly every respect the struggle for an honest and friendly relation must be successful; but success comes slowest and most doubtfully in questions of honesty in written work. Even here a person whose written work is dishonest may be perfectly straightforward in confessing what he has done, might go to the stake rather than deny it. The discouraging thing is that he should do it at all. Equally discouraging is his defence. He admits that, looked at critically, he has missed an educational opportunity; but the loss is his only, and need not worry the Faculty: if detected, he cannot expect credit for his composition; but to suspend him is monstrous. He himself affirms that he did what everybody does; that he "had to hand in something," was not well, and was short of time; that his name on the theme is a mere