The New York Alumni.

Some of the speeches made at the dinner of the New-York Harvard Club touching as they do upon vital topics connected with the university, should interest all. The first gentlemen introduced by the president of the club, Mr. Charles C. Beaman, was President Eliot, who spoke of Harvard substantially as follows:

"When I came here I met with many sentiments suggestive of criticism that we were making too many changes in the management of the college. There seemed to be a feeling that we were doing too much in the way of changes even as regards improvements. If there is a perennial plant in this world it is the Harvard boy, and he will not submit to changes unless they are gradual. To reform the manners of the students we must reform the manners of the overseers. Another line of criticism among undergraduates has been about the choice of studies as being novel and as representing a too fast movement. I want to point out the fact that Harvard College has been too conservative and slow. Years ago it was pointed out that Harvard College must be changed from a school of the eighteenth century to a university of the nineteenth century. It is nearly twenty years since the elective system was adopted at the college, and it has been sixty years during which we have been developing elective studies, only finishing our work last June. The course of events shows that there is to be a real university at Cambridge, and if the purpose of the country as regards gifts is continued, we are bound to be one in a few years. We get more money than any other university, if that is to be taken as an evidence of popular approval. Not that I think money is everything. Sometimes I am told that we are more careful at Cambridge of things intellectual rather than things moral. I am satisfied that there is no better evidence of moral grandeur than that which is shown in intellectual achievements. 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' is a grand moral declaration; gentlemen, you are the fruits of the university."

The principal speech of the evening was made by Col. Henry Lee, of Boston, one of the overseers. He said in closing:

"The marvellous growth and awakening of the college consequent upon the transfer of the privilege and responsibility of shaping its policy from the legislature to the alumni, and their wise exercise of this power, has inspired its friends, within and without, with new interest and confidence, and hence the continuous flow of gifts, great and small, from rich and poor, into its treasury. Of course, we must not and do not forget the important agency of our president, elected three years after the new organization,-who, by the by, never would have been elected our president by the old board of overseers,-his increasing vigilance, his leader-like assurance have determined and directed many of the donations. Oftentimes in the progress of Memorial Hall, when I, as treasurer, held back, the president would enumerate my various resources in such a convincing way that I felt for the time embarrassed with riches; and you owe to him, more than to any one, the completion of that noble edifice for less than the estimated cost and one year before the promised time. But he is a fanatic, and we run Harvard College, rushing to fanaticism, picking up here and there enthusiastic scholars willing to take the vows of perpetual poverty; and this policy seems to me dangerous and derogatory to a great university, which we are striving to build up. The compensation should be such as to invite men of scholarly tastes and enthusiasm who long to become teachers of men to adopt that profession, without feeling that, by adopting this choice, they are depriving their wives and children of the social and educational privileges of the families of law-years or physicians, or of average merchants. The calling of a teacher is much more appreciated than it was fifty years ago, but there is still a selfish disregard of their rightful claims, because of their helplessness, on the part of their more money-getting brethren, which savors of meanness and hypocrisy in a community which is forever pointing with pride, as the nation would say, to their schools and their colleges. We want for Harvard College, to place her professors and other insturctors on a proper footing, just to them and creditable and secure for us, $60,000 more per annum, or something over $1,000,000; and now is the opportunity you New Yorkers have been longing for to endow your alma mater.

I am aware that old age is stealthy,-

No eye observes the growth or the decay,

To-day we look as we did yesterday.

Still, I must confess that I was shocked at the president's complaint of the security of the present board of overseers, and still more shocked that, in a torchlight procession during the late unpleasantness, Harvard students bore a transparency inscribed, "Average age of Overseers, 95 in the Shade." Now, this is absurd, as absurd as the assertion in one of your journals that your Mr. Evarts "was too old for a senator," and that he "was too old to change his mind." Why, your new senator is Billy Evarts, Evarts, who used to reel off Adams's Latin Grammar at the Boston Latin School,-only a few years ago, and we are his contemporaries. I contend that these charges are libelous, both as against Mr. Evarts and the overseers. Still, there are younger alumni, and you can, if you see fit, in your next election, drop some of us silvertops and insert some younger graduates. Remember, however, that,-

Striving to do better, oft we mar what's well. If the president succeeds in composing the board of younger counselors, I trust he may, in the words of the preacher, "miss not the discourse of the elders."

James W. Alexander, president of the Alumni Association of Princeton College, told of the esteem in which Harvard was held by Princeton men. He said that if Harvard College should abolish Greek and Latin and prayers, as was proposed, American fathers would be obliged to send their sons to Princeton for the classics and religion, and to Yale for foot-ball. [Laughter.] The Hon. John P. Washburne, of Worcester, spoke briefly as a representative of the Harvard class of '53. He said that that class had given to Harvard its present president. As it was true that John Harvard founded Harvard College, is was equally true that Charles Eliot founded Harvard University.