From the Illustrated American.

The following is taken from "The Passing of the Puritan," an article in the Illustrated American for November ninth:

"Harvard College stands beyond the river Charles, looking at Bunker Hill and Boston. It is the boast of Boston; yet it were better for the life and morals of Boston that it were under the sea, or three hundred miles away in the woods of Maine. The day has been when Harvard produced giants-scholars, statesmen, soldiers and patriots; but that is only a tradition now. Harvard is simply a training school for the sons of the rich, a place where wealth is honored and glorified, where the rich man's son is taught his own importance and the dignity of his money bags. Harvard can best be typified as the goddess Minerva trotting around the town with a collection box in her hand; she has business only in the Back Bay and lifts her skirts away from the contamination of the North End.

Those who stop to reflect on Harvard's achievements will recall that at some date in the past she won a football game, when by an error of judgment a few sons of poor men were allowed on the football team.

"The effect of Harvard on the morals of Boston is about the same as that of a standing army of idle soldiers on a European garrison city. An army of rich and idle young men descend upon the town; they may increase the gayety of the world; they do not decrease the social evil and its train of iniquities.

"The universities of the world have been the havens of humanity, the nurseries of freedom, the well-spring of the doctrines that uplift the world. Harvard as the home of wealth, the solicitor of the wealthy, is not likely to rudely disturb the rich man's dreams, to brotherhood or the dignity of man. The experience of a Western university, where a professor named Bemis was dismissed for questioning the virtue of stolen wealth, is not likely to be duplicated in Harvard.