looked out into the neighborhood so strange to me, and a restless suspicion of what was to come ran through my mind.  Then we heard in I the distance a loud shouting like the voices of a number of men, and nearer and nearer they seemed to come.  Lights had been brought shortly before, and, as the uproar was close upon us, a servant burst in to warn us to extinguish them.  We asked with curiosity why, and what the shouting mob wanted.  We suspected, indeed, that it was students.  The servant told us that they were on their way to the house of Professor A——­, who was unpopular with them—­I knew not why—­to salute him with their Pereat, or college damnation.  The cry of some hundred students grew plainer and plainer.  ‘Out with lights!’ was called, and just then we heard the panes of glass clatter when the warning was not quickly enough complied with.  I confess that this circumstance, occurring so soon after my arrival, filled me with a kind of gloom.  It was not such things as this that had called me to Jena:  these were not the voices which I had wished and expected to hear, and my first night was a sad one.”

[Footnote 3:  German Universities.  Translated by W.L.  Gage.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co., 1874.  Steffens little imagined at the time that he was destined to become a German professor.]

Jena, be it said in her praise, is no longer what she was:  her students no longer break window-panes or perform the Gaensemarsch or elect their beer-duke of Lichtenhain.  The great herd has scattered, and the few who are left dwell with their professors in peace.  But has the spirit of brutality passed wholly away?  Perhaps loving parents who have placed their sons under the “protecting” influence of some quiet country town believe so.  It is almost a pity to disturb their faith.  Yet truth is uncompromising.  Let us record and ponder the fact—­epithets are superfluous—­that in the year of grace 1874, in a small college town not one hundred miles distant from the City of Brotherly Love, students supposed to be guided and restrained by influences more distinctively “Christian” than any that ever mitigated the barbarism of Jena, could become utterly lost to all recollection of father and mother, brother and sister, could forget their own manhood, could steal under cover of night to the house of an unpopular professor and bombard the windows, to the peril of his wife and mother, and of his child in the cradle.

Truly, we have been surfeited with mistaken praise of small colleges and rural virtue.  We have a right to demand that our colleges, whatever they may undertake or omit, shall teach at least the first lesson of life—­manliness.  This lesson is not best learned by withdrawing one’s self from the world, burying one’s self in an obscure and unrefined village, foregoing social intercourse with amiable men and women, and wrapping one’s self in a mantle of traditional prejudice.  President Porter, although a staunch defender of the existing