To cover the two or three pages at my command with a sober protest against our social evils, or an attempt to conceal the fact that such evils exist, is as far from my design as it is justly beyond the province of our Magazine.

If you expect a thoughtful argument either for or against our moral standard, you will not be gratified. But I have heard many, who see not too much of our inner College life, waste-hours in bitter depreciation of our moral tendencies. I have read many articles, now in the - daily Journals, now in the circulating Reviews, and more than once in the "Lit." itself, some defending, most condemning, and all exaggerating our peculiar characteristics. And whatever I write will be, not so much an answer to any one of these articles, as a reply to them all in that feature of misrepresentation which I have found so marked and blinding. If I attain the end of my purpose, I shall find a fair and even estimate, by which we may determine the influence of our common life on the individual character.

Culture has, emphatically, an elevating and refining tendency, and a wholesome influence on the mind. We have just heard the soul defined as the man himself, the vital agent which speaks in every act, and without which man cannot move. In its original, primeval state, the soul is rough, untutored, degraded, devoid of all restraint, moral and intellectual. The savage finds his keenest delight in cruelty, his VOL. XXIX.

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fullest pleasure in an unlicensed abandonment of all that makes life worth living, his acme of satisfaction in an intemperate debauchery. Humanity has no sadder experience than a work among such men. 'Tis true, a searching civilization will some day find them out, and lift them up to their destined sphere: but generations must fall, ages must be forgotten, before they can know anything of a temperate existence. The mind is taught every step of the regenerating process, and it is education, after all, that is the grand, potent instrument. It may be safely asserted, then, as a general principle, that culture bas a natural onward and upward tendency, and the principle applies with equal force to the individual and to the community. Here, our avowed purpose, at least, is a schooling of the mind, not simply intellectual, but peculiarly, too, in a moral and social direction. That our future will be only the beneficent development of this healthful exercise, if the generous principle at the basis of College life has full sway, no one will deny. The only question that reason will warrant is, whether the growth of this natural progress is stunted or impeded by our contingent habits and customs. Said a friend to me, a few weeks since, "I don't believe in Colleges: they are a terrible test of character." For “terrible,” insert "trying," and I believe the sentiment. But the experience leaves us stronger and better men, and we engage in the battle of life, it may be, scarred by many a contest, but with a firmer moral courage, and better equipped to meet the demands of a progressive society.

I have already hinted that my aim will be not so much an exposition of our intellectual discipline, as a defense of our social characteristics. And I believe there are few who recognize and admit the importance of this latter element in the student life. Study the history of any class you choose, and tell me how does the first day compare with the last of the course, in the men it offers for your sifting process.

Some from every State find here a common center, one hundred strong-presenting a curious diversity of character and feeling—all cramped in thought, all rough in tastes, all wanting that symmetrical expansion of ideas and sentiment which is here vouchsafed. That roughness is taken off, that narrowness of thought is laid aside, that half-fledged tenet is exchanged or superceded by a broad, philanthropic activity, and this is, in the main, effected by our distinctive, social life. And the mental reform is natural, too. I know of no place or age in which the relations of man with fellow-man are so closely interwoven, as with us: and the softening influences of this intimacy are unmistakable. College life seems to me like a stupendous mould, in which