In Re New England Colleges.

New England has always prided itself on the fact that it was not only a pioneer in the cause of popular education in this country but that its educational institutions are second to none in the whole broad land. It is, therefore, a bit startling, to express it mildly, to hear from no less distinguished a person than the Rev. Billy Sunday now conducting a revival in the very shadow of Harvard University, that New England colleges are the "rottenest" in the country. The noted revivalist is quoted, in the news-paper reports of his sermon to mothers last Friday, as saying: "There are damnable things being taught in the colleges of the country by men called professors and the rottenest of all are here in New England and it is here that the people of the West are sending their children for instruction. I shall tell the people of the West, when I go back, that the students' faith in God is torn to shreds here in your colleges. Such institutions, I say, should be blotted out. If I wanted to make sure of a boy becoming an infidel. I should send him to one of these colleges." This sweeping indictment includes all the colleges of New England, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Tufts, Bowdoin and the others. Even Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley and the other girls' colleges are not specifically exempted from the charge, for the people of the West send their girls to these institutions, which are colleges in every sense of the word. How much personal investigation by Mr. Sunday preceded this wholesale denunciation we are, of course, unable to say. He did not attempt to go into details, nor did he state where or how he got the information on which his sensational charges were based. He denounced the New England colleges, all of them, as the rottenest in the country and as training schools for infidels, and he threatened that when he went back to the West he would advertise the New England colleges as such. It may be within his power to do some temporary injury to the educational institutions of New England, but we are rather inclined to believe that his entirely uncalled for attack on the New England colleges will result in a vastly greater injury to himself. Springfield (Mass.) Morning Union.