THE COLLEGE 129 



straighten out an equal number of isolated individuals. Isolated 

 good and isolated evil are more nearly on an equality. But good 

 influence can be organized and mobilized a hundred times as quickly 

 and effectively as evil influence; and where the moral forces in 

 faculty and students are alert, the fraternities serve as rallying- 

 points for the concentration of the good and the dispersion of the 

 evil. 



Departmental clubs, in which one or two members of the faculty 

 meet informally with a few of the more interested students for con- 

 ference on some phase of their subject, are perhaps the consumma- 

 tion of the college spirit. Modern methods of instruction, however, 

 make contact in the laboratory over experiments and in the library 

 in research so close that many of the regular classes assume more the 

 aspect of a club than a class. The newest and best college libraries 

 provide small rooms for the use of books by professors and students 

 together in each literary and historical department; and regard such 

 rooms quite as indispensable as the room where books alone are 

 stored. 



There is one serious danger, and only one, that besets the college. 

 The ordinary objections, hazing, excessive athletics, dissipation, 

 lawlessness, idleness, are due either to exaggeration of exceptional 

 cases, or the unwarranted expectation that large aggregations of 

 youth will conduct themselves with the decorum that is becoming 

 where two or three mature saints are gathered together for conference 

 and prayer. I grant that a man who cherishes this expectation will 

 be disappointed; and if he chances to be a college officer, and under- 

 takes to realize this expectation, he will be deservedly miserable. 

 With all its incidental follies and excesses, college conduct is more 

 orderly, college judgment is more reasonable, college character is 

 more earnest and upright, than are the judgment, conduct, and 

 character of youth of the same age in factories, offices, and stores, 

 or on farms or on shipboard. As far as these matters go, college 

 is physically, mentally, and morally the safest place in the world 

 for a young man. 



The one serious danger is so subtle that the public has never sus- 

 pected its existence; and even to many a college officer the statement 

 of it will come as a surprise. It is the danger of missing that solitude 

 which is the soil of individuality and the fertilizer of genius. College 

 life is excessively gregarious. Men herd together so closely and con- 

 stantly that they are in danger of becoming too much alike. The 

 pursuit of four or five subjects at the same time tends to destroy that 

 concentration of attention to one thing on which great achievement 

 rests. The same feverish interest in athletics, the same level of 

 gossip, the same attitude toward politics and religion, tend to pass by 

 contagion from the mass to the individual, and supersede independ- 



