as go to mill with their meal on
one side of the saddle and a stone on the other to balance, as their
fathers did, because it never occurred to their loggerheads to divide
the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should not be
surprised; but hazing occurs among boys who have been accustomed to the
circulation of ideas, boys old enough and intelligent enough to
understand the difference between brutality and frolic, old enough to
know what honor and courage mean, and therefore I cannot conceive how
they should countenance a practice which entirely ignores and defies
honor, and whose brutality has not a single redeeming feature. It has
neither wisdom nor wit, no spirit, no genius, no impulsiveness, scarcely
the mirth of boyish frolic. A narrow range of stale practical jokes,
lighted up by no gleam of originality, is transmitted from year to year
with as much fidelity as the Hebrew Bible, and not half the latitude
allowed to clergymen of the English Established Church. But besides its
platitude, its one overpowering and fatal characteristic is its intense
and essential cowardice. Cowardice is its head and front and bones and
blood. One boy does not single out another boy of his own weight, and
take his chances in a fair stand-up fight. But a party of Sophomores
club together in such numbers as to render opposition useless, and
pounce upon their victim unawares, as Brooks and his minions pounced
upon Sumner, and as the Southern chivalry is given to doing. For sweet
pity's sake, let this mode of warfare be monopolized by the Southern
chivalry.

The lame excuse is offered, that it does the Freshmen good,--takes the
conceit out of them. But if there is any class in college so divested of
conceit as to be justified in throwing stones, 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