class. Thus, they had the right to wear side-arms, and had their own
courts of justice. Some of these privileges have survived, in England
and Germany at least, to the present day. Yet even in Germany the old
student spirit is evidently on the wane, and is doomed to extinction
at a day not far distant. In America, on the contrary, where like
causes have never operated, the spirit exists in force. It is due
to peculiar causes--to college life, to locality and to the mode of
teaching.

The tendency to monkish seclusion lingers in England and America,
the lands that have led the van in political and social progress. The
motives that urged the monks of the olden time to turn their backs
upon the world and bury themselves in cloisters were praiseworthy:
but for such havens of peace, letters might have perished. When the
Reformation was carried out in England, and the sequestration of
Church property left immense convents idle, it was only natural that
the newly-established colleges and halls should convert the buildings
to their own uses. The dormitory system of Oxford and Cambridge,
accordingly, has an historic right of being; and, growing by natural
laws, it has become so rooted in the national life that nothing short
of a political revolution, greater even than that of the seventeenth
century, could eradicate it. The founders of our earliest colleges
were governed by the desire to make them conform as closely as might
be to the English model. There is scarcely the trace of a disposition
to look to the institutions of continental Europe for guidance. This
was a matter of course. The founders of our colleges and the men
whom they selected to be teachers were Englishmen by descent or by
education, trained after the English fashion--seeking freedom in
America, yet at heart sympathizing with English thought, English
habits and English prejudices. Hence the establishment of our