THE FIRST YEARS OF CORNELL -1868 -1870 351 



that I had understood that the entire class proposed to 

 make common cause with their officers and leave the uni- 

 versity with them; that to this we interposed no objection; 

 that it simply meant less work for the faculty during the 

 remainder of the year; that it was far more important 

 for the university to maintain a character for decency and 

 good discipline than to have a large body of students ; and 

 that, if necessary to maintain such a character, we would 

 certainly allow the whole student body in all the classes to 

 go home and would begin anew. I then drew a picture. 

 I sketched a member of the class who had left the univer- 

 sity on account of this discipline entering the paternal 

 door, encountering a question as to the cause of his unex- 

 pected home-coming, and replying that the cause was the 

 outrageous tyranny of the president and faculty. I pic- 

 tured, then, the father and mother of the home-coming 

 student asking what the cause or pretext of this " tyranny " 

 was, and I then said : ' * I defy any one of you to show your 

 father and mother the 'mock programme ' which has 

 caused the trouble. There is not one of you here who dares 

 do it ; there is not one of you who would not be turned out 

 of his father's door if he were thus to insult his mother. " 

 At this there came a round of applause. I then expressed 

 my personal regret that the penalty must fall upon four 

 men whom I greatly respected; but fall it must unless 

 the offenders were manly enough to give themselves 

 up. The result was that at the close I was greeted with a 

 round of applause; and immediately afterward the four 

 officers came to me, acknowledged the justice of the disci- 

 pline, and expressed the hope that their suspension might 

 not go beyond that term. It did not: at the close of the 

 term they were allowed to return; and from that day 

 "mock programmes" of the sort concerned, which in many 

 American colleges had been a chronic evil, never reap- 

 peared at Cornell. The result of this action encouraged 

 me greatly as to the reliance to be placed on the sense of 

 justice in the great body of our students when directly 

 and properly appealed to. 



