Now in an American college there is esprit du corps enough, and sense of college dignity enough.  But the student’s esprit du corps is one thing, and the government’s is another.  The Commons Hall, for instance, has died out of most of our colleges.  Why?  Why, because it had ceased to be a Commons Hall.  It was not the place where the junior and senior members of a college, the pupils and all their instructors, met together.  It was the place where the undergraduates were fed,—­and where a few wretched tutors were fed at their sides.  But every member of the governing body who could possibly escape did so.  At our Cambridge, they even went so far as to set apart a Commons Hall for each class of undergraduates at last,—­for fear men should see each other eat; as at “Separate Prisons” the idea of communion in worship is carried out by introducing each prisoner into a state-pew or royal-box whose partitions are so high that he cannot see his neighbors.  This was before they gave the coup-de-grace to the whole thing, and scattered the members of their college just as widely as they could at meal-times, as at all other times.  The recitation, again, probably the only occasion when an American student meets his instructor, is conducted according to an arrangement by which the instructor meets all of a large section or class together, meeting them for recitation simply.  In a word, the American college differs from any other American school chiefly in having larger endowments and older pupils.

In the English college, on the other hand, before a freshman has been there three months, he may have established his claim to some “scholarship,” which shall be his post and his “foundation” there for years.  From the very beginning, one or another honor or prize is proposed to him,—­which is the first stepping-stone on a line of promotion of which the last may be his appointment to the highest dignities in the University or in the Church.  From the beginning, therefore, he has his duties in the college assigned to him, if he have earned any right to such honors.  Thus, it may be his place to read the Scripture Lesson at prayers, or to read the Latin grace at the end of dinner,—­the President and Vice-President of his college having done the same at the beginning.

These arrangements are not to be confounded with the services rendered by charity students.  We have imitated some of these, which are so sadly described in “Tom Brown at Oxford.”  But we have no arrangements which correspond at all to those of the system which in England brings graduates and undergraduates to a certain extent into a common life, mutually interested in the honor and popularity of “Our College.”

When Mr. Maurice and his friends spoke of “a college,” they meant to carry to the utmost these social and mutual views of college life.  They wanted to come into closer connection with the working-men of London, and formed the Working-Men’s College that they might do so.