Another prolific source of trouble is the class system.  Whether this system is to be maintained as it is, or to be modified, or to be abandoned for another more in accordance with the needs of the age, are questions which must be kept in abeyance.  The answer will depend upon the view which we take of higher education in the main.  Meanwhile, let us consider the system in its operations during the past and at the present day.  Here, as so often before, Germany affords us a warning example of the dangers consequent upon the recognition of class distinctions.  The comparatively harmless practice of Deposition—­a burlesque student-initiation which sprang up in the sixteenth century and obtained a quasi sanction from no less a person than Luther—­degenerated in the seventeenth century into Pennalisimus.  Newly-matriculated students, called Pennalists (the modern term is Fuechse), were maltreated by the elder ones, the Schorists, and were pillaged and forced to perform menial services “such as a sensible master would hesitate to exact of his servant[4].”  The Schorists considered themselves a licensed corporation.  To give an idea of their deportment, not merely toward the younger students, but even toward the university itself, it will suffice to state that they conducted their orgies at times in the public streets without fear or shame.  In 1660, during the student insurrection at Jena, they assaulted and dispersed the Academic Senate in session.  The governmental rescripts of those days are taken up with accounts of the evil and the means proposed for curing it.  The matter was even brought before the Imperial Diet.  Pennalismus was not suppressed until the close of the century, after the various governments had resorted to the most stringent measures.  Such excesses have, of course, never been committed in America; yet we observe the same spirit of insubordination to superiors and domination over inferiors betraying itself in the New World.  When we hear of “rushing,” “hazing,” “smoking-out” and the like, we must admit to ourselves that the animus is the same, although the form be only ludicrous.  And what shall we say to performances such as the explosion of nitro-glycerine?  Much may be urged in extenuation of the offences of the German students in the seventeenth century.  Their sensibilities were blunted by the horrors of a Thirty Years’ War; they had been born and reared amid bloodshed and rapine; some of them must have served in the campaigns of Baner, Torstenson and Wrangel, where human life went for nothing, and honor for less than nothing.  Some of them, perhaps, could not name their parents.  They were waifs of the camp, their only education the crumbs of knowledge picked up in the camp-school mentioned by Schiller in his Wallenstein.  Our students, on the contrary, are anxiously shielded against temptation and are carefully trained for their work.  Why, then, should they be the only set of persons to disobey, as a set, the rules of public order?  The answer suggests itself:  Because they have acquired the habit of joint action without the sense of individual responsibility.