PRICES OF COLLEGE ROOMS AGAIN.

RATHER an excited article appeared in the Advocate of February 16 regarding the prices we pay for our rooms in Cambridge. It seems hardly likely that, if the writer of that article had reflected calmly on the subject, he would have arrived at the extreme conclusions to which the Advocate has given publicity. There are rooms in Cambridge of all sizes, positions, and prices, - a variety, we should have supposed, sufficient to please the most fastidious. If the price of a room is three hundred dollars, and an applicant finds it exorbitant, the College kindly offers him a pleasant and sunny room for forty. There are dear rooms and cheap rooms, and each one can take his choice. The writer of the article in the Advocate makes an error of judgment when he compares Harvard's dormitories and prices unfavorably with those of other colleges. He says that the best rooms in Tufts are seventy-five dollars; but who would not give more for a bad room in our buildings than for the best one at Tufts? He says the average price of rooms at Yale is seventy dollars. This is true enough, but we may venture to say that Yale rooms are dear at that price. In the old buildings everything is musty and shabby. In the new everything is so new as to give a cold and cheerless aspect to the rooms. Further, in the new buildings at Yale the rooms have no open grates, but are heated by close and unhealthy steam-pipes. Is it better to pay a few dollars less and spend your evenings with your feet on a hot iron pipe instead of at a homelike grate?

There is another reason why the college rents are at present not too high. It is that every man has a right to get what price he can for his property, and as long as the rooms are regularly let at the present prices, it would be folly in the College to decrease them. Expensive rooms are provided for the wealthy, and comfortable, but plain ones for the poorer students. It frequently happens, too, that some of the best rooms in the Yard, - as some in Hollis and Stoughton, - are let at very low prices. Thus it is certain that every student can get a good room here in proportion to his means; but those who are willing only to pay $70 cannot expect as good accommodations as those who pay $300. There is a class of writers for the College papers who seize upon some imaginary wrong of this description with avidity, as it affords them a subject upon which to write. These little attempts are harmless enough when carefully pruned by the editorial shears, but in this case the feelings of the writer have evidently got the mastery of his good sense on one or two occasions.

B. T.