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EXTRAVAGANCE AT COLLEGE

BRAINS AND BRAWN

HAZING

THE SOUL OF THE GENTLEMAN

THEATRE MANNERS

WOMAN'S DRESS

SECRET SOCIETIES

TOBACCO AND HEALTH

TOBACCO AND MANNERS

DUELLING

NEWSPAPER ETHICS

EXTRAVAGANCE AT COLLEGE

Young Sardanapalus recently remarked that the only trouble with his life in college was that the societies and clubs, the boating and balling, and music and acting, and social occupations of many kinds, left him no time for study. He had the best disposition to treat the faculty fairly, and to devote a proper attention to various branches of learning, and he was sincerely sorry that his other college engagements made it quite impossible. Before coming to college he thought that it might be practicable to mingle a little Latin and Greek, and possibly a touch of history and mathematics, with the more pressing duties of college life; but unless you could put more hours into the day, or more days into the week, he really did not see how it could be done.

It was the life of Sardanapalus in college which was the text of some sober speeches at Commencement dinners during the summer, and of many excellent articles in the newspapers. They all expressed a feeling which has been growing very rapidly and becoming very strong among old graduates, that college is now a very different place from the college which they remembered, and that young men now spend in a college year what young men in college formerly thought would be a very handsome sum for them to spend annually when they were established in the world. If any reader should chance to recall a little book of reminiscences by Dr. Tomes, which was published a few years ago, he will have a vivid picture of the life of forty and more years ago at a small New England college; and the similar records of other colleges at that time show how it was possible for a poor clergyman starving upon a meagre salary to send son after son to college. The collegian lived in a plain room, and upon very plain fare; he had no "extras," and the decorative expense of Sardanapalus was unknown. In the vacations he taught school or worked upon the farm. He knew that his father had paid by his own hard work for every dollar that he spent, and the relaxation of the sense of the duty of economy which always accompanies great riches had not yet begun. Sixty years ago the number of Americans who did not feel that they must live by their own labor was so small that it was not a class. But there is now a class of rich men's sons.

The average rate of living at college differs. One of the newspapers, in discussing the question, said that in most of the New England colleges a steady and sturdy young man need not spend more than six hundred dollars during the four years. This is obviously too low an estimate. Another thinks that the average rate at Harvard is probably from six hundred to ten hundred a year. Another computes a fair liberal average in the smaller New England colleges to be from twenty-four to twenty-six hundred dollars for the four years, and the last class at Williams is reported to have ranged from an average of six hundred and fifty dollars in the first year to seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars in the Senior. But the trouble lies in Sardanapalus. The mischief that he does is quite disproportioned to the number of him. In a class of one hundred the number of rich youth may be very small. But a college class is an American community in which every member is necessarily strongly affected by all social influences.

A few "fellows" living in princely extravagance in superbly furnished rooms, with every device of luxury, entertaining profusely, elected into all the desirable clubs and societies, conforming to another taste and another fashion than that of the college, form a class which is separate and exclusive, and which looks down on those who cannot enter the charmed circle. This is galling to the pride of the young man who cannot compete. The sense of the inequality is constantly refreshed. He may, indeed, attend closely to his studies. He may "scorn delights, and live laborious days." He may hug his threadbare coat and gloat over his unrugged floor as the fitting circumstance of "plain living and high thinking." It is always open to character and intellect to perceive and to assert their essential superiority. Why should Socrates heed Sardanapalus? Why indeed? But the average young man at college is not an ascetic, nor a devotee, nor an absorbed student unmindful of cold and heat, and disdainful of elegance and ease and the nameless magic of social accomplishment and grace. He is a youth peculiarly susceptible to the very influence that Sardanapalus typifies, and the wise parent will hesitate before sending his son to Sybaris rather than to Sparta.

When the presence of Sardanapalus at Harvard was criticised as dangerous and lamentable, the President promptly denied that the youth abounded at the university, or that his influence was wide-spread. He was there undoubtedly, and he sometimes misused his riches. But he had not established a standard, and he had not affected the life of the university, whose moral character could be favorably compared with that of any college. But even if the case were worse, it is not evident that a remedy is at hand. As the President suggested, there are two kinds of rich youth at college. There are the sons of those who have been always accustomed to riches, and who are generally neither vulgar nor extravagant, neither ostentatious nor profuse; and the sons of the "new rich," who are like men drunk with new wine, and who act accordingly.

The "new rich" parent will naturally send his son to Harvard, because it is the oldest of our colleges and of great renown, and because he supposes that through his college associations his son may pave a path with gold into "society." Harvard, on her part, opens her doors upon the same conditions to rich and poor, and gives her instruction equally, and requires only obedience to her rules of order and discipline. If Sardanapalus fails in his examination he will be dropped, and that he is Sardanapalus will not save him. If his revels disturb the college peace, he will be warned and dismissed. All that can be asked of the college is that it shall grant no grace to the golden youth in the hope of endowment from his father, and that it shall keep its own peace.

This last condition includes more than keeping technical order. To remove for cause in the civil service really means not only to remove for a penal offence, but for habits and methods that destroy discipline and efficiency. So to keep the peace in a college means to remove the necessary causes of disturbance and disorder. If young Sardanapalus, by his extravagance and riotous profusion and dissipation, constantly thwarts the essential purpose of the college, demoralizing the students and obstructing the peaceful course of its instruction, he ought to be dismissed. The college must judge the conditions under which its work may be most properly and efficiently accomplished, and to achieve its purpose it may justly limit the liberty of its students.

The solution of the difficulty lies more in the power of the students than of the college. If the young men who are the natural social leaders make simplicity the unwritten law of college social life, young Sardanapalus will spend his money and heap up luxury in vain. The simplicity and good sense of wealth will conquer its ostentation and reckless waste.

BRAINS AND BRAWN

It is towards the end of June and in the first days of July that the great college aquatic contests occur, and it is about that time, as the soldiers at Monmouth knew in 1778, that Sirius is lord of the ascendant. This year it was the hottest day of the summer, as marked by the mercury in New York, when the Harvard and Yale men drew out at New London for their race. Fifty years ago the crowd at Commencement filled the town green and streets, and the meeting-house in which the graduating class were the heroes of the hour. The valedictorian, the salutatorian, the philosophical orator, walked on air, and the halo of after-triumphs of many kinds was not brighter or more intoxicating than the brief glory of the moment on which they took the graduating stage, under the beaming eyes of maiden beauty and the profound admiration of college comrades.

Willis, as Phil Slingsby, has told the story of that college life fifty and sixty years ago. The collegian danced and drove and flirted and dined and sang the night away. Robert Tomes echoed the strain in his tale of college life a little later, under stricter social and ecclesiastical conditions. There was a more serious vein also. In 1827 the Kappa Alpha Society was the first of the younger brood of the Greek alphabet--descendants of the Phi Beta Kappa of 1781--and in 1832 Father Eells, as he is affectionately called, founded Alpha Delta Phi, a brotherhood based upon other aims and sympathies than those of Mr. Philip Slingsby, but one which appealed instantly to clever men in college, and has not ceased to attract them to this happy hour, as the Easy Chair has just now commemorated.

Echo undoubtedly answers No; and she asks, also, whether in such a competition, when the appeal is to youth, eager, strong, combative, full of physical impulse and prowess, in the time of romantic enjoyment and heroic susceptibility, study is not heavily handicapped, and books at a sorry disadvantage with boats. This is what Echo distinctly inquiries; and what answer shall be made to Echo? Who is the real hero to young Slingsby, who has just fitted himself to enter college--the victor in the boat-race or the noblest scholar of them all? The answer seems to be given unconsciously in the statement that the number of students applying for entrance is notably larger when the college has scored an athletic victory. But this answer is not wholly satisfactory. There may be an observable coincidence, but young men usually prepare themselves to enter a particular college, and do not await the result of boat-races.

But the fact remains that the true college hero of to-day is the victor in games and sports, not in studies; and it is not unnatural that it should be so. It is partly a reaction of feeling against the old notion that a scholar is an invalid, and that a boy must be down in his muscle because he is up in his mathematics. But, as Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas, it does not follow, because I think that innocent men should have equal rights, that I wish my daughter to marry a negro. It does not follow, because the sound mind should be lodged in a sound body, that the care of the body should become the main, and virtually the exclusive, interest.

Yet that this is now somewhat the prevailing tendency of average feeling is undeniable, and it is a tendency to be considered by intelligent collegians themselves. For the true academic prizes are spiritual, not material; and the heroes for college emulation are not the gladiators, but the sages and poets of the ancient day and of all time. The men that the college remembers and cherishes are not ball-players, and boat-racers, and high-jumpers, and boxers, and fencers, and heroes of single-stick, good fellows as they are, but the patriots and scholars and poets and orators and philosophers. Three cheers for brawn, but three times three for brain!

HAZING

As if a bell had rung, and the venerable dormitories and halls upon the green were pouring forth a crowd of youth loitering towards the recitation-room, the Easy Chair, like a college professor, meditating serious themes, and with a grave purpose, steps to the lecture-desk. It begins by asking the young gentlemen who have loitered into the room, and are now seated, what they think of bullying boys and hunting cats and tying kettles to a dog's tail, and seating a comrade upon tacks with the point upward. Undoubtedly they reply, with dignified nonchalance, that it is all child's play and contemptible. Undoubtedly, young gentlemen, answers the professor, and, to multiply Nathan's remark to David, You are the men!

The bovine or brutal quality is by no means wholly worked out of the blood even yet. The taste for pugilism, or the pummelling of the human frame into a jelly by the force of fisticuffs, as a form of enjoyment or entertainment, is a relapse into barbarism. It is the instinct of the tiger still surviving in the white cat transformed into the princess. I will not call it, young gentlemen, the fond return of Melusina to the gambols of the mermaid, or Undine's momentary unconsciousness of a soul, because these are poetic and pathetic suggestions. The prize-ring is disgusting and inhuman, but at least it is a voluntary encounter of two individuals. But college bullying is unredeemed brutality. It is the extinction of Dr. Jekyll in Mr. Hyde. It is not humorous, nor manly, nor generous, nor decent. It is bald and vulgar cruelty, and no class in college should feel itself worthy of the respect of others, or respect itself, until it has searched out all offenders of this kind who disgrace it, and banished them to the remotest Coventry.

The meanest and most cowardly fellows in college may shine most in hazing. The generous and manly men despise it. There are noble and inspiring ways for working off the high spirits of youth: games which are rich in poetic tradition; athletic exercises which mould the young Apollo. To drive a young fellow upon the thin ice, through which he breaks, and by the icy submersion becomes at last a cripple, helpless with inflammatory rheumatism--surely no young man in his senses thinks this to be funny, or anything but an unspeakable outrage. Or to overwhelm with terror a comrade of sensitive temperament until his mind reels--imps of Satan might delight in such a revel, but young Americans!--never, young gentlemen, never!

The soul of the gentleman, what is it? Is it anything but kindly and thoughtful respect for others, helping the helpless, succoring the needy, befriending the friendless and forlorn, doing justice, requiring fair-play, and withstanding with every honorable means the bully of the church and caucus, of the drawing-room, the street, the college? Respect, young gentlemen, like charity, begins at home. Only the man who respects himself can be a gentleman, and no gentleman will willingly annoy, torment, or injure another.

There will be no further recitation today. The class is dismissed.

THE SOUL OF THE GENTLEMAN

To find a satisfactory definition of gentleman is as difficult as to discover the philosopher's stone; and yet if we may not say just what a gentleman is, we can certainly say what he is not. We may affirm indisputably that a man, however rich, and of however fine a title in countries where rank is acknowledged, if he behave selfishly, coarsely, and indecently, is not a gentleman. "From which, young gentlemen, it follows," as the good professor used to say at college, as he emerged from a hopeless labyrinth of postulates and preliminaries an hour long, that the guests who abused the courtesy of their hosts, upon the late transcontinental trip to drive the golden spike, may have been persons of social eminence, but were in no honorable sense gentlemen.

The catch, however, is simple. Using the same word, we interchange its different meanings. To say that a man is born a gentleman is to say that he was born under certain social conditions. To say in commendation or description of a man that he is a gentleman, or gentlemanly, is to say that he has certain qualities of character or manner which are wholly independent of the circumstances of his family or training. In the latter case, we speak of individual and personal qualities; in the former, we speak of external conditions. In the one case we refer to the man himself; in the other, to certain circumstances around him. The quality which is called gentlemanly is that which, theoretically, and often actually, distinguishes the person who is born in a certain social position. It describes the manner in which such a person ought to behave.

Behavior, however, can be imitated. Therefore, neither the fact of birth under certain conditions, nor a certain ease and grace and charm of manner, certify the essential character of gentleman. Lovelace had the air and breeding of a gentleman like Don Giovanni; he was familiar with polite society; he was refined and pleasing and fascinating in manner. Even the severe Astarte could not call him a boor. She does not know a gentleman, probably, more gentlemanly than Lovelace. She must, then, admit that she can not arbitrarily deny Lovelace to be a gentleman because he is a libertine, or because he is false, or mean, or of a coarse mind. She may, indeed, insist that only upright and honorable men of refined mind and manner are gentlemen, and she may also maintain that only men of truly lofty and royal souls are princes; but there will still remain crowds of immoral gentlemen and unworthy kings.

The persons who abused the generous courtesy of the Northern Pacific trip were gentlemen in one sense, and not in the other. They were gentlemen so far as they could not help themselves, but they were not gentlemen in what depended upon their own will. According to the story, they did not even imitate the conduct of gentlemen, and Astarte must admit that they belonged to the large class of ungentlemanly gentlemen.

THEATRE MANNERS

An admirable actress said the other day that the audience in the theatre was probably little aware how much its conduct affected the performance. A listless, whispering, uneasy house makes a distracted and ineffective play. To an orator, or an actor, or an artist of any kind who appeals personally to the public, nothing is so fatal as indifference. In the original Wallack's Theatre, many years ago, the Easy Chair was one of a party in a stage-box during a fine performance of one of the plays in which the acting of the manager was most effective. It was a gay party, and with the carelessness of youth it made merry while the play went on. As the box was directly upon the stage, the merriment was a gross discourtesy, although unintentional, both to the actors and to the audience; and at last the old Wallack, still gayly playing his part, moved towards the box, and without turning his head, in a voice audible to the offenders but not to the rest of the audience, politely reminded the thoughtless group that they were seriously disturbing the play. There was some indignation in the box, but the rebuke was courteous and richly deserved. Nothing is more unpardonable than such disturbance.

During this winter a gentleman at one of the theatres commented severely upon the loud talking of a party of ladies, which prevented his enjoyment of the play, and when the gentleman attending the ladies retorted warmly, the disturbed gentleman resorted to the wild justice of a blow. There was an altercation, a publication in the newspapers, and finally an apology and a reconciliation. But it is to be hoped that there was some good result from the incident. A waggish clergyman once saw a pompous clerical brother march quite to the head of the aisle of a crowded church to find a seat, with an air of expectation that all pew-doors would fly open at his approach. But as every seat was full, and nobody stirred, the crestfallen brother was obliged to retrace his steps. As he retreated by the pew, far down the aisle, where the clerical wag was sitting, that pleasant man leaned over the door, and greeted his comrade with the sententious whisper, "May it be sanctified to you, dear brother!" Every right-minded man will wish the same blessing to the rebuke of the loud-talking maids and youths in theatres and concert-halls, whose conversation, however lively, is not the entertainment which their neighbors have come to hear.

Two or three winters ago the Easy Chair applauded the conduct of Mr. Thomas, who, at the head of his orchestra, was interrupted in the midst of a concert in Washington by the entry of a party, which advanced towards the front of the hall with much chattering and rustling, and seated themselves and continued the disturbance. The orchestra was in full career, but Thomas rapped sharply upon his stand, and brought the performance to an abrupt pause. Then, turning to the audience, he said--and doubtless with evident and natural feeling: "I am afraid that the music interrupts the conversation." The remark was greeted with warm and general applause; and, waiting until entire silence was restored, the conductor raised his baton again, and the performance ended without further interruption.

"No," responded Cleopatra, briskly; "the same imbecility prevents."

"Very well; then such an audience plainly needs a strong and resolute leadership; and that is precisely what Thomas supplied. A crowd is always grateful to the man who will do what everybody in the crowd feels ought to be done, but what no individual is quite ready to undertake."

When Cleopatra said that an audience is quite competent to take care of itself, her remark was natural, for she instinctively conceived the audience as herself extended into a thousand persons. Such an audience would certainly be capable of dispensing with any mentor or guide. But when the Easy Chair asked her if she was annoyed by the chattering interruption which Thomas rebuked, she replied that of course she was annoyed. Yet when she was further asked if she cried "Hush!" or resorted to any means whatever to quell the disturbance, the royal lady could not help smiling as she answered, "I did not," and the Easy Chair retorted, "Yet an audience is capable of protecting itself!"

Meanwhile, whatever the conductor or the audience may or may not do, nothing is more vulgar than audible conversation, or any other kind of disturbance, during a concert. Sometimes it may be mere thoughtlessness; sometimes boorishness, the want of the fine instinct which avoids occasioning any annoyance; but usually it is due to a desire to attract attention and to affect superiority to the common interest. It is, indeed, mere coarse ostentation, like wearing diamonds at a hotel table or a purple velvet train in the street. If the audience had the courage which Cleopatra attributed to it, that part which was annoyed by the barbarians who chatter and disturb would at once suppress the annoyance by an emphatic and unmistakable hiss. If this were the practice in public assemblies, such incidents as that at the Washington concert would be unknown. Until it is the practice, even were Cleopatra's self the offender, every self-respecting conductor who has a proper sense of his duties to the audience will do with its sincere approval what Mr. Thomas did.

WOMAN'S DRESS

The American who sits in a street omnibus or railroad-car and sees a young woman whose waist is pinched to a point that makes her breathing mere panting and puffing, and whose feet are squeezed into shoes with a high heel in the middle of the sole, which compels her to stump and hobble as she tries to walk, should be very wary of praising the superiority of European and American civilization to that of the East. The grade of civilization which squeezes a waist into deformity is not, in that respect at least, superior to that which squeezes a foot into deformity. It is in both instances a barbarous conception alike of beauty and of the function of woman. The squeezed waist and the squeezed foot equally assume that distortion of the human frame may be beautiful, and that helpless idleness is the highest sphere of woman.

But the imperfection of our Western civilization shows itself in more serious forms involving women. The promiscuous herding of men and women prisoners in jails, the opposition to reformatories and penitentiaries exclusively for women, and, in general, the failure to provide, as a matter of course, women attendants and women nurses for all women prisoners and patients, is a signal illustration of a low tone of civilization. The most revolting instance of this abuse was the discovery during the summer that the patients in a woman's insane hospital in New Orleans were bathed by male attendants.

It should not need such outrages to apprise us of the worth of the general principle that humanity and decency require that in all public institutions women should be employed in the care of women. A wise proposition during the year to provide women at the police-stations for the examination of women who are arrested failed to become law. It is hard, upon the merits of the proposal, to understand why. Women who are arrested may be criminals, or drunkards, or vagabonds, or insane, or witless, or sick. But whatever the reason of the arrest, there can be no good reason whatever, in a truly civilized community, that a woman taken under such circumstances should be abandoned to personal search and examination by the kind of men to whom that business is usually allotted. The surest sign of the civilization of any community is its treatment of women, and the progress of our civilization is shown by the constant amelioration of that condition. But the unreasonable and even revolting circumstances of much of the public treatment of them may wisely modify ecstasies over our vast superiority.

SECRET SOCIETIES

The melancholy death of young Mr. Leggett, a student at the Cornell University, has undoubtedly occasioned a great deal of thought in every college in the country upon secret societies. Professor Wilder, of Cornell, has written a very careful and serious letter, in which he strongly opposes them, plainly stating their great disadvantages, and citing the order of Jesuits as the most powerful and thoroughly organized of all secret associations, and therefore the one in which their character and tendency may best be observed. The debate recalls the history of the Antimasonic excitement in this country, which is, however, seldom mentioned in recent years, so that the facts may not be familiar to the reader.

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