unheeded and unfriended. At Harvard College, the Faculty, through its system of advisers for Freshmen, has made a beginning; and though there are hardly enough advisers to go round, the system has proved its usefulness. At Harvard College, also, a large committee of Seniors and Juniors has assumed some responsibility for all the Freshmen. Each undertakes to see at the beginning of the year the Freshmen assigned to him, and to give every one of them, besides kindly greeting and good advice, the feeling that an experienced undergraduate may be counted on as a friend in need." – This is excellent, but all the more surprised will the reader be to find that this author continues in the following strain: "Whether colleges should guard their students more closely than they do – whether, for example, they should with gates and bars protect their dormitories against the inroads of bad women – is an open question. For the deliberately vicious such safeguards would amount to nothing; but for the weak they might lessen the danger of sudden temptation."[1] As to the "open ques-
- ↑ Atlantic Monthly, March 1900. – A somewhat similar principle is stated in an article on Eton, in the Edinburgh Review, April 1861: "It was the fashion in Sydney Smith's days – it is so still – to maintain that the neglect to which boys are necessarily exposed at our public schools, in consequence of the insufficient number of assistant masters, renders them self-reliant and manly; and that the premature initiation into vice, which too often results from that cause, imparts to them an early knowledge of what are apologetically called 'the ways of the world'; and prevents their running riot when subsequently exposed at the universities to still greater temptations than those offered them in their boyhood by the public-houses and slums of Eton and Windsor." Quoted in the Dublin Review, October 1878, p. 308. – This
