1864.] REMINISCENCES OF AMHERST COLLEGE. 3-45 



students, is developed ; and though men who have a knack of 

 throwing off personal responsibility and shirking their duties cau 

 go through such meetings lightly, and even jocosely, they often 

 weigh heavily upon the President, who is personally responsible 

 for the proper adjustment and management of the whole machine. 

 Consequently these Faculty meetings, held, as they usually are, 

 in the evening, and sometimes protracted to a late hour, are 

 among the most trying of a President's duties. They often wore 

 very much upon me, especially when followed, as they sometimes 

 were, by the admonition, dismissal, or expulsion of delinquents. 

 In almost every such case, the public sentiment and sympathy in 

 College would be with the offender, however aross his crimes. 

 The same would generally be the case with friends at home, and 

 with the community at large. A college Faculty are looked upon 

 by many as an aristocratic, arbitrary, and tyrannical set, whom 

 every humane man is bound to oppose ; and multitudes who never 

 saw even the outside of a college, feel fully competent to sit in 

 judgment upon their acts and to denounce them. It is this out- 

 side sympathy with those who are under discipline that does more 

 than anything else to sustain them in their misdeeds, and to 

 encourage the rebellions that are the frequent consequence of college 

 discipline; and it is the necessity of thus going against the popular 

 will, and of encountering reactions as the consequence that may 

 rend the college in pieces, that is more trying to a President than 

 all his literary labors. Even in a Christian college, where is often 

 a sprinkling of some of the most difficult elements to control, he is 

 not unfrequently made to feel that he sits upon a volcano, which, 

 though now quiet, may at any moment become active. 



" My epistolary correspondence in the Presidency was peculiarly 

 onerous. I had previously been so much of a jack at all trades 

 that I had laid myself open to enquiries aiid assaults from a" 

 classes. The same mail (and I hardly exaggerate the literal fact) 

 might bring inquiries about some point in the theory of temperance 

 — how to employ garnet in making sand-paper — -how to reconcile 

 the imputation of Adam's sin with our sense of justice — where to 

 find the best beds of sulphate of baryta — whether I would like to 

 exchange or buy shells, minerals, and fossils — how cheaply an indi- 

 gent young man can go through the college, and with what helps 

 — whether I knew of any one who would m?k3 a good teacher of a 

 common school or of an academy, or a professor in a college, or any 

 one to supply a pulpit — what I thought of a new theory of drift, or 



