with my Lot. I would not change my Condition nor give up the Prospect I have before me, on any Terms almost whatever.

I am not much hurried this Winter with my Studies; but I am trying to advance myself in an Acquaintance with my fellow-Creatures, & with the Labours of the "Mighty Dead.”

I am sorry that I may inform you, that two of our Members were expelled from the College yesterday; not for Drunkenness, nor Fighting, not for Swearing, nor Sabbath-Breaking. But, they were sent from this Seminary, where the greatest Pains and Care are taken to cultivate and encourage Decency, & Honesty, & Honour, for stealing Hens! Shameful, mean, unmanly Conduct!

If a Person were to judge of the generality of Students, by the Conduct of such earth-born, insatiate Helluo's; or by the detested Character of wicked Individuals, (which is generally soonest & most extensively propagated & known abroad,) how terrible an Idea must he have!

Please to remember my kind Regards to my Brothers; Sister BECKA & the whole Family. I feel my Heart warm with Esteem for them! but can only further, at present, write myself, dear Father, Yours, P. FITHIAN

It is hardly necessary to say that organized athletics had little place in the colonial college compared with their vogue in the modern American college and university. Even as recently as the Civil War an English observer, while

greatly praising the earnest zeal of the American undergraduate in his studies, had this to say:

The utmost physical recreation seemed to consist in a country walk, and I doubt if even this was common. This absence of desire for physical sports seems more or less common throughout America, and is very strange in the eyes of those accustomed to the exhibition of animal spirits in the English youth of both sexes.1

But the current of youthful energy which was forbidden to flow freely in the path of athletics found its outlets elsewhere, and not only in miscellaneous mischief such as shocked the young Fithian. There were no Greek letter societies until Phi Beta Kappa was organized in 1776, but rival literary societies with long Greek names served equally well as centers of social life and generators of clan loyalty. Ritual functions accumulated around commencement and other college anniversaries. Special local customs, such as the burning of Euclid at the end of a mathematical course, took root and spread, and even before the advent of college journalism the poet and the satirist found opportunity to make known their talent to the campus.

Sophia Jex Blake, A Visit to Some American Schools and Colleges (1867), p. 33.

However greatly the student may have resented the paternal oversight of his conduct which custom then required of the faculty, he submitted willingly to the no less exacting informal discipline imposed upon him by his older fellows, hoping perhaps to become a despot in his turn. The Freshman rules of today are but a survival of the iron code prevalent in colonial times. The English fagging system still obtained; Freshmen were compelled to perform "all reasonable errands for any superior," as the Yale rules of 1764 put it. To quote further from the Yale code, "A Senior may take a Freshman from a Sophomore, a Bachelor from a Junior, and a Master from a Senior." The Freshman must stand aside for upperclassmen at entrances or on stairways, must refrain from such boisterous conduct as running in the college yard or calling from a window, and must not sit in the presence of an upperclassman or other superior without special permission.

These questions of college life are not so remote from the main purpose of education as they may seem. Just as the instructor made correctness and propriety of expression the aim of literary teaching and discouraged the original if it were also the unconventional, and just as the college President and

his assistants made the faith and morals of their charges their chief concern, so did the student body accept and impose its own discipline to curb the eccentric or nonconformist Freshman. Individuality, in a word, was taken for granted, but it was something to be restrained rather than fostered. Perhaps this was a wise course in a frontier commonwealth; perhaps this type of disciplinary education was necessary to give social cohesion to the young republic whose leaders and founders were trained by the colonial college. At all events, the education provided was, as far as it went, no sham. College was no excuse for idling, as too commonly was the case in eighteenth century Oxford and Cambridge. The American student obtained his degree only by hard intellectual work and, not infrequently, he remained in college only by supporting himself there by hard work of another kind. America had yet to create a leisure class.

CHAPTER V

FRANKLIN AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION

Franklin's is the weightiest voice that has as yet sounded from across the Atlantic. — Matthew Arnold.

FRANKLIN'S name is likely to occur in the first paragraphs of any history of American activities, whether the subject be diplomacy or printing, electricity or finance, literature or ventilation, religion or soap-making. Certainly it would be impossible to write of American education without mention of the various projects that originated in his versatile and ingenious mind. Franklin was selfeducated. His theory and practice of mental and moral education are given in his Autobiography. Franklin was sent to the Boston Grammar School when he was eight but was soon withdrawn for, as the youngest son of seventeen children, he was needed by his father to assist in molding tallow candles. At the age of twelve he was apprenticed to a brother who was a printer and thus was started