affairs of whose institutions are so managed, and they all expressed themselves as well satisfied with the result. One officer who was in general charge of undergraduate affairs in the institution to which he belonged said, in speaking to me, that he should not himself want to assume the responsibility of deciding the complicated matters which arise in connection with student discipline; they seemed to him too difficult to solve, but he was very well satisfied to leave such things with the students who were doing it seriously and satisfactorily. His viewpoint seems to me very much as if a banker might say that his financial affairs were so complicated and tangled and so difficult of intelligent solution that he was more contented to turn them over to his children to be dealt with than to settle them himself.
I have always had an abiding faith in students, and I am quite sure that when they set themselves seriously to the accomplishment of even a difficult task it is likely to be done well; but I have had experience in disciplinary matters and know something of other executive problems which may come before a college officer. There is nothing with which I have had to do officially that requires such careful judgment as disciplinary matters—such diplomacy, such sympathy, such firmness, such freedom from prejudice and bias, such skill in handling all who are concerned with the affair. If the lines between good and evil, between truth and falsity, could always be clearly drawn, if motives and the influences which surround the erring student did not have to be considered, if, in short, we were not dealing with the most subtle and intangible things when we are trying
