the professor really supposes that there is any fun or humor or joke in
this form of college bullying. Turn to your _Evelina_ and see what
was accounted humorous, what passed for practical joking, in Miss Burney's
time, at the end of the last century. It is not difficult to imagine Dr.
Johnson, who greatly delighted in _Evelina_, supposing the intentional
upsetting into the ditch of the old French lady in the carriage to be a
joke. For a man who unconsciously has made so much fun for others as "the
great lexicographer," Dr. Johnson seems to have been curiously devoid of a
sense of humor. But he was a genuine Englishman of his time, a true John
Bull, and the fun of the John Bull of that time, recorded in the novels and
traditions, was entirely bovine.

The bovine or brutal quality is by no means wholly worked out of the
blood even yet. The taste for pugilism, or the pummelling of the human
frame into a jelly by the force of fisticuffs, as a form of enjoyment or
entertainment, is a relapse into barbarism. It is the instinct of the tiger
still surviving in the white cat transformed into the princess. I will not
call it, young gentlemen, the fond return of Melusina to the gambols of the
mermaid, or Undine's momentary unconsciousness of a soul, because these are
poetic and pathetic suggestions. The prize-ring is disgusting and inhuman,
but at least it is a voluntary encounter of two individuals. But college
bullying is unredeemed brutality. It is the extinction of Dr. Jekyll in Mr.
Hyde. It is not humorous, nor manly, nor generous, nor decent. It is bald
and vulgar cruelty, and no class in college should feel itself worthy of
the respect of others, or respect itself, until it has searched out all
offenders of this kind who disgrace it, and banished them to the remotest
Coventry.

The meanest and most cowardly fellows in college may shine most in hazing.
The generous and manly men despise it. There are noble and inspiring ways