GOWN vs. TOWN.

TWO hundred and forty years have passed since a "school or college" was founded by the "General Court" on the then verdant banks of Charles River. In those good old days Gown reigned supreme; the boating-men could have rowed a race from Watertown to the spot afterwards to be made famous by the great Taft, without entangling their oars, or rather paddles, in the frequent drawbridge. No gas-works as yet disturbed the sylvan freshness of the scene; horse-car tracks were unknown; the classic shades of Harvard held peaceful sway from their throne of elms to the hills beyond the meadows. Peelers were unknown; offenders against the peace feared rather a dignified reproof in the shape of a few lines of good old Anacreon, than the rubicund justice of a Portchuck beak. Even the mucker element (which we may consider represented by the associates of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck) was more in sympathy with the unfettered student and the lurking proctor, than the peremptory and unromantic system of the officials of modern and un-civil law.

And now what a change! We awake to find all our bulwarks against this distressingly prosaic and democratic country rudely thrust aside. A hungry monster has arisen, which threatens to absorb us, annex us, - call it what new-fangled name ye will! We are hampered by the Port! While we of Old Cambridge have been enlightening the world, dreaming with Plato, fighting with Calvin, discussing with Darwin, a town - a modern, busy, trading, prosaic, mushroom, damnable town - has been started, is growing beneath our very nose! We believe they have a "City Hall" and a "Government," - we are not sure that the College, whose refining, softening, broadening influence has so long been felt throughout the whole country, is not partly in the power of a collection of dram-drinking politicians! Cambridgeport, indeed! What would it be without Harvard? A collection of slaughter-houses, - a pig-killing village. Whoever heard of Cambridge but as the seat of Harvard University, from which it got its very name!

The Port is our vampire. Her government runs streets for shops through our sacred soil, her peelers interfere with our after-dinner reveries, her people crowd our conveyances to Boston, her factories disgust us. Her mucker roams in freedom through our sacred yard, her maiden robs the freedom of the student's heart. The Port is of the nineteenth century, shoppy; we who feel - to use a vulgarism - the ancient and patrician oats of our two hundred and thirty-ninth year (Freshmen of the present year especially) will no longer bear the plebeian yoke.

And here is our plan. Let two such discordant elements as Old Cambridge and the new and very manufactured Port be divorced. Prospect Street could be made the border-land of the finite and human, while Cambridge, Old Cambridge, would know no other law than the philosophy of the Unconditioned, transcending all the petty efforts of a Port government. The students and professors would be the voters of the town; and every ambitious Sophomore might air his rhetoric at the caucus, and possibly taste the sweets of office. The voters would parade the town in caps and gowns, and listen to stirring addresses in Greek and Latin; and the venerable College would flourish, unrestrained by other rule than that of the body which first founded it, the "General Court of Massachusetts Bay."

C. P. N.