tudent has been
defined by a German pedagogue as an animal that cannot be forced, but
must be persuaded. If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also
the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its
work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two
conditions--opportunity and inspiration--will be a success, will draw to
itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of
all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the
land.

Nothing so fatal to inspiration as excessive legislation. It creates two
parties, the governors and the governed, with efforts and interests
mutually opposed; the governors seeking to establish an artificial
order, the governed bent on maintaining their natural liberty. I need
not ask you, Alumni, if these two parties exist at Cambridge. They have
always existed within the memory of "the oldest graduate."

Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond
the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic
jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no penalty
but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against
positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of
civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern
himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and
familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and
personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the
most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be
placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and
fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German
Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the
last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which
seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the
ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,[C] as well as the
mediaeval and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it
when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors,
should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands.
This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German
universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of
oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American
colleges, an