the welfare of the State, consecrated to Christ and the Church, is to
be given to a practice which no one will maintain positively conduces
to either piety or learning, which many believe to be positively
detrimental to both, and which an overwhelming majority of the clergy
who founded the College, and of their ecclesiastical descendants at the
present day, would, I am confident, condemn, and yet is not to be
publicly spoken of, because it is a private affair! Has it any right
to privacy? Does the College belong to a Senior Class, or to the
State? Have the many donations been given, and the appropriations been
made, for the pleasure or even profit of any one class, or for the
whole Commonwealth? Has any class any right to introduce in any
College hall, or anywhere, as a College class, with the sanction of the
Faculty, a custom which is entirely disconnected with either learning
or piety, a custom of doubtful propriety, not to say morality inasmuch
as many believe it to be wrong, and a custom, therefore, whose tendency
is to weaken confidence in the College, and consequently to restrict
its beneficence? And is the discussion of this thing a violation of
the rites of hospitality?

These are my counts against "Class-Day," as it is now conducted. It
contains much that is calculated to promote neither learning nor
godliness, but to retard both. Neither literary nor moral excellence
seems to enter as an element into its standard. In point of notoriety
and popular interest it seems to me to reach, if not to over-top,
Commencement-Day, and therefore it tends to subordinate scholarship to
other and infinitely less important matters. It in a manner
necessitates an expenditure which many are ill able to bear, and under
which, I have reason to believe, many parents do groan, being burdened.
It has not the pleasure and warmth of reunion to recommend it, for it
precedes separation. The expense is not incurred by men who are
masters of their own career, who know where they stand and what they
can do; but chiefly by boys who are dependent upon others, and whose
knowledge of ways and means is limited, while their knowledge of wants
is deep and pressing and aggressive. It is an extraordinary and
unnecessary expense, coming in the midst of ordinary and necessary
expense, while the question of reimbursement is still entirely in
abeyance. It launches young men at the outset of their career into
extravagance and display,--limite