We are not concerned with the dormitory system in all its bearings, but only in so far as it directly affects the student.  The fact is significant that a large majority of our collegians pass their term of four years, vacations excepted, in practical seclusion.  They are gathered in large numbers in dingy and untidy caravanseries, where the youthful spirit is unchecked by the usual obligations to respect private property and individual quiet.  President Porter, in his work on The American Colleges, endeavors to prove that the dormitory system is, upon the whole, favorable to discipline.  The facts are against his argument.  The evils of student life are two—­vice and disorder.  So far as the former is concerned, no system has succeeded, or will ever succeed, in extirpating it.  Vice may be punished, but it is too deeply rooted in human nature to be wholly cured.  Its predominating forms are drinking and gambling, neither of which is checked by the dormitory system.  At Oxford, for instance, both these vices prevail despite the most elaborate system of gates and night-patrols.  Our college faculties must perforce content themselves with detecting vice, and punishing it when detected.  The most satisfactory and appropriate means of detection is to watch closely the way in which the student performs his college duties.  No man can waste his time over cards or the bottle without betraying his dissipation in the recitation-room.  Here, and not in the dormitory, is the professor’s hold upon the student.  The dormitory system, so far from restraining, rather tends to diffuse vice and render its practice easy.

Disorder is different from vice.  The latter, the doing of things wrong in themselves or made wrong by force of opinion, shuns observation:  the former courts it.  The disorderly act is in many instances harmless enough in itself, and the evil lies in doing it in an improper place and at an improper time.  Hence it is that good students, who would scorn to stoop to vice, so often suffer themselves to be led to the commission of an act of disorder.  We may even go to the extent of admitting that occasionally college disorder is not without a certain color of reason.  It is the youthful way of resenting a real or an imaginary grievance.  When a class discovers that it or some of its members have been treated too severely, according to its standard, by a certain professor, what more natural than to create a disturbance in the recitation-room or in public?  In itself considered, the act is a youthful ebullition, and we might be tempted at first to look upon it as something venial and pass it by in silence.  Reflection, however, should lead us to the opposite conclusion.  There is nothing that a college faculty cannot afford to pardon sooner than disorder.  The reason is almost self-evident.  There is nothing that ruins so effectually the general tone of the college and demoralizes all the students, good and bad.  Vice moves in rather narrow circles—­much more