A LETTER FROM PROF. JAMES.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON. - Within a day or two I have heard students, otherwise intelligent, speak of the recent action about the college yard as an attempt to make students do "police duty," and as an "outrageous" procedure on the part of the faculty. Were such a strange misapprehension wide spread, that might easily account for the lack of interest in the late election of a yard committee. If by "police duty" be meant anything like an eventual reporting of disorderly students to the Dean, I venture to say that not a single one of all the faculty-members who unanimously passed the vote ever conceived of the possibility of such a thing. The vote was a bonafide declaration of a trust that the students, if left entirely to their own counsels, would permanently guard a permanent interest of the university more efficiently than the faculty has ever been able to guard it. How they should do this we did not undertake to decide or enquire. We merely named an existing student-body, as the initiator of organization, and trusted that there was enough of public spirit in the college and enough of the usual American good sense and capacity for public questions, to come to the front and find some way of making the will of the majority prevail. That an overwhelming majority would vote for the college yard not becoming a nuisance in the midst of the town, if the question were put abstractly, who can doubt. It remains to be seen, however, whether individuals will back their abstract preferences, or let the question, "ought the faculty to treat undergraduates as boys or men?" be settled, for many years to come, by a few irresponsible larkers acting for their own personal amusement now. I must confess that the weak point of the Harvard character seems to me to be a lack of moral courage in the deeper affairs of life. An individual who comes here full of it, finds himself in a non-conducting medium. His vibrations die away like the sound of a bell in an air pump. I have heard the older men who succeeded in mitigating the uproar of the freshmen after the late boat races sneered at as officious. If there were 700 or 800 like them in college we should not hear much about officiousness. The majority now have matters absolutely in their own hands, it they will say their soul's their own. It will be a strange thing under the sun, if a thousand men of our race, to whom increased independence is offered, are so scared at the responsibility that goes with it, as to respond to the challenge by a general sauve-quipeut.

Faithfully yours,WM. JAMES.