even for the brief period of four years false and pernicious views of the fundamental principles of life.  It is the duty of every community to suppress error en voie de fait, wherever it may occur.  And if it is our duty to suppress, it is no less our duty to prevent.  Common sense and experience teach us that danger must arise from gathering large numbers of young men in places too small to hold them in check.  Are we not at liberty to borrow an example from the history of President Porter’s own college?  In the days when the president was a young professor, Yale was a small college and New Haven was a small town.  The name of the college then was, to speak mildly, notorious.  The Yale of thirty or forty years ago seemed to personify everything that was obnoxious and lawless in our college life:  in no other place did the conflict between “town” and “gown” assume such dimensions and lead to such deplorable results.  Yet the Yale of to-day, although the number of students has trebled, will compare favorably with any college or university.  The students, without having lost a particle of true manliness and independence, riot less and learn more:  they show in every way that they are better students and better citizens.  Wherein, then, lies the secret of the change?  Evidently, in the circumstance that the city has outgrown the college.  New Haven is no longer an insignificant town, but has become the seat of a large local trade and the centre of heavy manufacturing and railroad interests.  Like other cities, it has established a paid fire department and a strong police force for the protection of all its residents, the college included.  It is no longer overshadowed, much less over-awed, by the college.  On the contrary, the observation forces itself upon the visitor in New Haven that the college, notwithstanding its numerous staff of able professors, notwithstanding its great body of students, its libraries and scientific collections, is far from playing the leading part in municipal matters.  It is only one among many factors.  Life and its relations are on an ampler scale:  the wealth and refinement of the permanent population are great, and are growing unceasingly.  In a few years more New Haven will be fairly within the vortex of New York.  This change, which has come about so gradually that those living in it perhaps fail to perceive it readily, has affected the college in many ways.  It has made the life of the professors more agreeable, more generous, so to speak, and it has toned down the student spirit of caste.  The young man who enters Yale feels, from the moment of matriculation, that he is indeed in a large city, and must conform to its regulations—­that there are such beings as policemen and magistrates, whom he cannot provoke with impunity.  Even were this all, it would be gain enough.  But there is another gain of a far higher nature.  The student perceives that outside his college world lies a larger world that he cannot overlook—­a world whose society is worth cultivating, whose opinions are backed by wealth and prestige.  It does not follow from this that he ceases to be a student.  Companions and study make him feel that he is leading a peculiar life, that he is a member of an independent organization.  But he does not feel—­and this is the main point—­that he has retired from the world or that he can set himself up against the world.