The lame excuse is offered, that it does the Freshmen good,—­takes the conceit out of them.  But if there is any class in college so divested of conceit as to be justified in throwing stones, it is surely not the Sophomore Class.  Moreover, whatever good it may do the sufferers, it does harm, and only harm, to the perpetrators; and neither the law nor the gospel requires a man to improve other people’s characters at the expense of his own.  Nobody can do a wrong without injuring himself; and no young man can do a mean, cowardly wrong like this without suffering severest injury.  It is the very spirit of the slaveholder, a dastardly and detestable, a tyrannical and cruel spirit.  If young men are so blinded by custom and habit that a meanness is not to them a meanness because it has been practised for years, so much the worse for the young men, and so much the worse for our country, whose sweat of blood attests the bale and blast which this evil spirit has wrought.  If uprightness, if courage, if humanity and rectitude and the mind conscious to itself of right, are anything more than a name.  Let the young men who mean to make time minister to life scorn and scotch and kill this debasing and stupid practice.

And why is not some legitimate and wholesome safety-valve provided by authority to let off superabundant vitality, that boys may not, by the mere occasions of their own natures, be driven into wickedness?  Class-Day is very well, but it comes only once a year, and what is needed is an opportunity for daily ebullition, so that each night may square its own account and forestall explosion.  Why should there not be, for instance, a military department to every college, as well as a mathematical department?  Why might not every college be a military normal school?  The exuberance and riot of animal spirits, the young, adventurous strength and joy in being, would not only be kept from striking out as now in illegitimate, unworthy, and hurtful directions, but it would become the very basis and groundwork of useful purposes.  Such exercise would be so promotive of health and discipline, it would so train and harmonize and limber the physical powers, that the superior quality of study would, I doubt not, more than atone for whatever deficiency in quantity might result.  And even suppose a little less attention should be given to Euclid and Homer, which is of the greater importance nowadays, an ear that can detect a false quantity in a Greek verse, or an eye that can sight a Rebel nine hundred yards off, and a hand that can pull a trigger and shoot him?  Knowledge is power; but knowledge must sharpen its edges and polish its points, if it would be greatliest available in days like these.  The knowledge that can plant batteries and plan campaigns, that is fertile in expedients and wise to baffle the foe, is just now the strongest power.  Diagrams and first-aorists are good, and they who have fed on such meat have grown great, and done the State