nes, it is surely not the
Sophomore Class. Moreover, whatever good it may do the sufferers, it
does harm, and only harm, to the perpetrators; and neither the Law nor
the Gospel requires a man to improve other people's characters at the
expense of his own. Nobody can do a wrong without injuring himself;
and no young man can do a mean, cowardly wrong like this without
suffering severest injury. It is the very spirit of the slaveholder, a
dastardly and detestable, a tyrannical and cruel spirit. If young men
are so blinded by custom and habit that a meanness is not to them a
meanness because it has been practised for years, so much the worse for
the young men, and so much the worse for our country, whose sweat of
blood attests the bale and blast which this evil spirit has wrought. If
uprightness, if courage, if humanity and rectitude and the mind
conscious to itself of right are anything more than a name, let the
young men who mean to make time minister to life scorn this debasing
and stupid practice.

Why, as one resource against this, as well as for its own intrinsic
importance, should there not be a military department to every college,
as well as a mathematical department? Why might not every college be a
military normal school, so that the exuberance and riot of animal
spirits, the young, adventurous strength and joy in being, might not
only be kept from striking out as now in illegitimate, unworthy, and
hurtful directions, but might become the very basis and groundwork of
useful purposes. Such exercise would be so promotive of health and
discipline, it would so train and LIMBER the physical powers, that the
superior quality of study would, I doubt not, more than atone for
whatever deficiency in quantity might result. And even suppose a
little less attention should be given to Euclid and Homer, which is of
the greater importance now-a-days, an ear that can detect a false
quantity in a Greek verse, or an eye that can sight a Rebel nine
hundred yards off, and a hand that can pull a trigger and shoot him?
Knowledge is power; but knowledge must sharpen its edges and polish its
points, if it would be greatliest available in days like these. The
knowledge that can plant batteries and plan campaigns, that is fertile
in expedients and wise to baffle the foe, is just now the strongest
power. Diagrams and first-aorists are good, and they who have fed on
such meat have grown great, and done the state service in their
gen