Sixteen years have gone by since the College was opened, but it cannot yet be said that the policy of the Directors is fixed.  These Directors, appointed by the City Councils, are eighteen in number, of whom six go out of office every year, while the Councils themselves are annually elected.  Hence the difficulty of settling upon a plan, and the greater difficulty of adhering to one.  Sometimes a majority has favored the introduction of Latin or Greek; again, the manual-labor system has had advocates; some have desired a liberal scale of living for the pupils; others have thought it best to give them Spartan fare.  Four times the President has been changed, and there have been two periods of considerable length when there was no President.  There have been dissensions without and trouble within.  As many as forty-four boys have run away in a single year.  Meanwhile, the Annual Reports of the Directors have usually been so vague and so reticent, that the public was left utterly in the dark as to the condition of the institution.  Letters from masters to whom pupils have been apprenticed were published in the Reports, but only the letters which had nothing but good to say of the apprentices.  Large numbers of the boys, it is true, have done and are doing credit to the College; but the public have no means of judging whether, upon the whole, the training of the College has been successful.

Nevertheless, we believe we may say with truth that invaluable experience has been gained, and genuine progress has been made.  To maintain and educate six hundred boys, even if those boys had enlightened parents to aid in the work, is a task which would exhaust the wisdom and the tact of the greatest educator that ever lived.  But these boys are all fatherless, and many of them motherless; the mothers of many are ignorant and unwise, of some are even vicious and dissolute.  A large number of the boys are of very inferior endowments, have acquired bad habits, have inherited evil tendencies.  It would be hard to overstate the difficulty of the work which the will of Girard has devolved upon the Directors and teachers of Girard College.  Mistakes have been made, but perhaps they have not been more serious or more numerous than we ought to expect in the forming of an institution absolutely unique, and composed of material the most unmanageable.

There are indications, too, that the period of experiment draws to an end, and that the final plan of the College, on the basis of common-sense, is about to be settled.  Mr. Richard Vaux, the present head of the Board of Directors, writes Reports in a style most eccentric, and not always intelligible to remote readers; but it is evident that his heart is in the work, and that he belongs to the party who desire the College to be the useful, unambitious institution that Girard wished it to be.  His Reports are not written with rose-water.  They say something.  They confess some failures, as well as vaunt some successes.