tence, too poor to live, too good to die,
might have become vigorous branches in the tree of knowledge. What
have we in return for the outlay? A series of structures concerning
which the most ardent friend of the system cannot but admit that
they are inelegant, uninspiring and unpractical. Some of the newer
dormitories at Harvard and Yale, it is true, are decided improvements.
They are well built and supplied with many conveniences that will
serve to make student life less heathenish. But they can scarcely be
called beautiful, and they certainly are not inspiring. The heart of
the student or the visitor at Oxford swells within him at the sight of
the grand architecture, the brilliant windows, the velvet turf. It is
pardonable in us to wish for ourselves a like refining beauty. But
is it not becoming in us to confess, without repining, that we cannot
realize the wish? Oxford is not merely the growth of ages: it is the
product of certain peculiar ages which have gone. Men build now for
practical purposes, not for the glorification of architecture. The
spirit of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will probably never
return, or, if it should, it will come as a folk-spirit, neither
springing from nor governed by the colleges, but carrying them along
with it. Hence, our colleges may content themselves with playing a
less ostentatious part, and the most zealous alumnus need not think
less of his alma mater for observing her limitations.

We are not concerned with the dormitory system in all its bearings,
but only in so far as it directly affects the student. The fact is
significant that a large majority of our collegians pass their term
of four years, vacations excepted, in practical seclusion. They are
gathered in large numbers in dingy and untidy caravanseries, where
the youthful spirit is unchecked by the usual obligations to respect
private property and individual quiet. President Porter, in his work
on _The American Colleges_, endeavors to prove that the dormitory
system is, upon the whole, favorable to discipline. The facts are
against his argument. The evils of student life are two--vice and
disorder. So far as the former is concerned, no system has succeeded,
or will ever succeed, in extirpating it. Vice may be punished, but
it is too deeply rooted in human nature to be wholly cured. Its
predominating forms are drinking and gambling, neither of which is
checked by the dormitory system. At Oxford, for instance, both
t