Harvard Morality.

"Harvard graduates scholars, but our smaller colleges graduate men," is a remark not unfrequently heard. Many a boy has been sent to Amherst or Dartmouth because his parents, although acknowledging the superior educational advantages of Harvard, have thought to keep their sons from the corrupting influences of a great university. But one may fairly ask what goes to make up manhood? If withdrawal from temptations, association with none but the strictly virtuous, blissful ignorance of vice make a man, then Harvard indeed does not graduate men. There is vice here, much of it, and he is blind who does not see it. Granted that there are greater temptations, and more immoral influences here than at any other college, does it follow that the graduates of the university are any the less men, because they have come into contact with wickedness? Who is the manlier, he who has never tasted the pleasures of vice, who perhaps does not know that such pleasures exist, or he who, knowing the pleasures, possibly even having some time enjoyed them, at length overcomes temptation? According to a milk-and-water standard of morality, the former is the better man, there hangs around him an air of immaculate purity, wings might become him. But is not the latter really morally higher; does he not have more of sturdy manliness?

Harvard is not the place for boys of vicious inclinations. Undoubtedly it will take them less time to run their course here than at any other college. But it is only a matter of time; they will go to the bad sooner or later. All this proves nothing as to Harvard's morality or immorality. It merely shows that here there are more opportunities to bring out a man's evil propensities. Neither is Harvard the place for the weakling, who, thanks to the watchful eye of a loving parent, has never seen the world outside of the orbit of the apron-strings. With an exultant sense of freedom he will plunge into the wildest dissipation.

A life at Harvard improves neither of these classes; they probably will not graduate as scholars, certainly not as men. But how about the large class of students who come here with tolerably good characters and intentions? Are they benefitted or harmed by the vice which surrounds them? A moralist of the old school would be shocked at the thought of a man's character being strengthened by contact with wickedness. But such is unquestionably the case. If indeed, his knowledge is of vice which is repellent and disgusting, then, although he may be all the more firmly resolved to shun it, he will be no stronger in character than before; it is only when vice takes on a pleasanter and more aesthetic garb that resistance is a virtue. In the first case, there is no temptation, consequently no virtue. It is only in resisting that which is agreeable that manhood is developed. Harvard sends forth, not men of guileless innocence and insipid morality, but men of sturdysinewy manliness.