hese vices prevail despite the most elaborate system of gates and
night-patrols. Our college faculties must perforce content themselves
with detecting vice, and punishing it when detected. The most
satisfactory and appropriate means of detection is to watch closely
the way in which the student performs his college duties. No man
can waste his time over cards or the bottle without betraying his
dissipation in the recitation-room. Here, and not in the dormitory,
is the professor's hold upon the student. The dormitory system, so far
from restraining, rather tends to diffuse vice and render its practice
easy.

Disorder is different from vice. The latter, the doing of things wrong
in themselves or made wrong by force of opinion, shuns observation:
the former courts it. The disorderly act is in many instances harmless
enough in itself, and the evil lies in doing it in an improper place
and at an improper time. Hence it is that good students, who would
scorn to stoop to vice, so often suffer themselves to be led to the
commission of an act of disorder. We may even go to the extent of
admitting that occasionally college disorder is not without a certain
color of reason. It is the youthful way of resenting a real or an
imaginary grievance. When a class discovers that it or some of its
members have been treated too severely, according to its standard, by
a certain professor, what more natural than to create a disturbance in
the recitation-room or in public? In itself considered, the act is a
youthful ebullition, and we might be tempted at first to look upon it
as something venial and pass it by in silence. Reflection, however,
should lead us to the opposite conclusion. There is nothing that a
college faculty cannot afford to pardon sooner than disorder.
The reason is almost self-evident. There is nothing that ruins so
effectually the general tone of the college and demoralizes all the
students, good and bad. Vice moves in rather narrow circles--much more
narrow than those in authority are apt to perceive. It does not affect
the great body of students, who are filled with robust life, and whose
very faults are conceits and extravagances rather than misdeeds. But
disorder spreads from one to another: originating with the morally
perverse, it gathers sufficient volume and momentum to overpower at
times even the very best. To protect the better class of students,
then, were there no other reason, the faculty is bound to interfere
en