n to warn us to
extinguish them. We asked with curiosity why, and what the shouting
mob wanted. We suspected, indeed, that it was students. The servant
told us that they were on their way to the house of Professor A----,
who was unpopular with them--I knew not why--to salute him with their
Pereat, or college damnation. The cry of some hundred students grew
plainer and plainer. 'Out with lights!' was called, and just then
we heard the panes of glass clatter when the warning was not quickly
enough complied with. I confess that this circumstance, occurring so
soon after my arrival, filled me with a kind of gloom. It was not such
things as this that had called me to Jena: these were not the voices
which I had wished and expected to hear, and my first night was a sad
one."

[Footnote 3: _German Universities_. Translated by W.L. Gage.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1874. Steffens little imagined at
the time that he was destined to become a German professor.]

Jena, be it said in her praise, is no longer what she was: her
students no longer break window-panes or perform the _Gaensemarsch_ or
elect their beer-duke of Lichtenhain. The great herd has scattered,
and the few who are left dwell with their professors in peace. But has
the spirit of brutality passed wholly away? Perhaps loving parents who
have placed their sons under the "protecting" influence of some quiet
country town believe so. It is almost a pity to disturb their
faith. Yet truth is uncompromising. Let us record and ponder the
fact--epithets are superfluous--that in the year of grace 1874, in
a small college town not one hundred miles distant from the City
of Brotherly Love, students supposed to be guided and restrained by
influences more distinctively "Christian" than any that ever mitigated
the barbarism of Jena, could become utterly lost to all recollection
of father and mother, brother and sister, could forget their own
manhood, could steal under cover of night to the house of an unpopular
professor and bombard the windows, to the peril of his wife and
mother, and of his child in the cradle.

Truly, we have been surfeited with mistaken praise of small colleges
and rural virtue. We have a right to demand that our colleges,
whatever they may undertake or omit, shall teach at least the
first lesson of life--manliness. This lesson is not best learned
by withdrawing one's self from the world, burying one's self in an
obscure and unrefined village, forego