ition of this spirit of respect, military
training is superior to civil. One officer salutes another, the
private salutes his officer, simply because the person saluted is an
officer. It may be that he is disagreeable or boorish in manners, or
even notoriously incompetent. This matters not: so long as he wears
the epaulettes he is entitled to an officer's salute. Honor is shown,
not to the transient owner of the title, but to the title itself.

The inculcation of a kindred spirit in all our colleges is devoutly to
be wished. It exists already in some of the older ones, especially
in the New England States, and in not a few of the very
recently-established ones. But even where it does exist it has not
full sway: it does not set, as it should set, the keynote to college
life in all its variations. And in very many colleges it is unable to
establish itself because of gross disorder. Should this opinion seem
harsh and sweeping, the reader, if a student or a graduate, has only
to recall to mind the instances that he himself must have observed of
discontent and disorder growing out of trifling causes and culminating
perhaps in a "class-strike." Let him consider the waste of time,
the ill-temper, the censorious, invidious spirit engendered by this
fermentation, the loss of faith in the conduct, and even the honesty,
of the faculty. Can he conceive of anything more likely to frustrate
all the aims of college study? Yet in nine-tenths of the cases of
public disorder it will be safe to assume that the dormitory
system lies at the base of the evil. Where it does not occasion the
grievance, it furnishes at least the machinery for carrying matters
to a direct issue. Community of life suggests of itself community of
action. The inmates of a dormitory acquire insensibly the habit of
standing by one another. This is so evident that it needs no proof.
But an illustration of the workings of the dormitory system and its
opposite in one and the same place will not come amiss. When the
Cornell University was founded, some of the trustees opposed the
erection of dormitories. Others, assuming that the people of Ithaca,
to whom a college was a novelty, could not or would not furnish
sufficient accommodation, argued that dormitories were an absolute
necessity. They carried the point: the Cascadilla was converted into a
large boarding-house for both professors and students, and the greater
part of South University was laid out in student-rooms.