observation of John Bull seems to warrant the conclusion that the nature of
his bovine ancestor is still far from eliminated from his descendant. And
what is the secret of your feeling? Simply that you hate bullying. Why,
then, young gentlemen, do you bully?

You retort perhaps that fagging is unknown in America, and that
high-spirited youth would not tolerate it. But permit the professor to
tell you what is not unknown in America: a crowd of older young gentlemen
surrounding one younger fellow, forcing him to do disagreeable and
disgusting things, pouring cold water down his back, making a fool of him
to his personal injury, he being solitary, helpless, and abused--all this
is not unknown in America, young gentlemen. But it is all very different
from what we have been accustomed to consider American. If we would morally
define or paraphrase the word America, I think we should say fair-play.
That is what it means. That is what the Brownist Puritans, the precursors
of the Plymouth Pilgrims, left England to secure. They did not bring
it indeed, at least in all its fulness, across the sea. Let us say,
young gentlemen, that its potentiality, its possibility, rather than its
actuality, stepped out of the _Mayflower_ upon Plymouth Rock. But from
the moment of its landing it has been asserting itself. You need not say
"Baptist" and "Quaker." I understand it and allow for it all. But fair-play
has prevailed over ecclesiastical hatred and over personal slavery, and
what are called the new questions--corporate power, monopoly, capital, and
labor--are only new forms of the old effort to secure fair-play.

Now the petty bullying of hazing and the whole system of college tyranny is
a most contemptible denial of fair-play. It is a disgrace to the American
name, and when you stop in the wretched business to sneer at English
fagging you merely advertise the beam in your own eyes. It is not possible,
surely, that any honorable young gentleman now attending to the lecture of