Ars Recte Vivendi | Page 4

at a sorry disadvantage with boats. This is what Echo distinctly
inquiries; and what answer shall be made to Echo? Who is the real hero
to young Slingsby, who has just fitted himself to enter college--the
victor in the boat-race or the noblest scholar of them all? The answer
seems to be given unconsciously in the statement that the number of
students applying for entrance is notably larger when the college has
scored an athletic victory. But this answer is not wholly satisfactory.
There may be an observable coincidence, but young men usually
prepare themselves to enter a particular college, and do not await the
result of boat-races.
But the fact remains that the true college hero of to-day is the victor in
games and sports, not in studies; and it is not unnatural that it should be
so. It is partly a reaction of feeling against the old notion that a scholar
is an invalid, and that a boy must be down in his muscle because he is
up in his mathematics. But, as Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas,
it does not follow, because I think that innocent men should have equal
rights, that I wish my daughter to marry a negro. It does not follow,
because the sound mind should be lodged in a sound body, that the care
of the body should become the main, and virtually the exclusive,
interest.
Yet that this is now somewhat the prevailing tendency of average
feeling is undeniable, and it is a tendency to be considered by
intelligent collegians themselves. For the true academic prizes are
spiritual, not material; and the heroes for college emulation are not the
gladiators, but the sages and poets of the ancient day and of all time.
The men that the college remembers and cherishes are not ball-players,
and boat-racers, and high-jumpers, and boxers, and fencers, and heroes
of single-stick, good fellows as they are, but the patriots and scholars
and poets and orators and philosophers. Three cheers for brawn, but
three times three for brain!
(September, 1887)

HAZING
As if a bell had rung, and the venerable dormitories and halls upon the
green were pouring forth a crowd of youth loitering towards the

recitation-room, the Easy Chair, like a college professor, meditating
serious themes, and with a grave purpose, steps to the lecture-desk. It
begins by asking the young gentlemen who have loitered into the room,
and are now seated, what they think of bullying boys and hunting cats
and tying kettles to a dog's tail, and seating a comrade upon tacks with
the point upward. Undoubtedly they reply, with dignified nonchalance,
that it is all child's play and contemptible. Undoubtedly, young
gentlemen, answers the professor, and, to multiply Nathan's remark to
David, You are the men!
As American youth you cherish wrathful scorn for the English boy who
makes another boy his fag, and you express a sneering pity for the boy
who consents to fag. You have read _Dr. Birch and His Young
Friends_, and you would like to break the head of Master Hewlett, who
shies his shoe at the poor shivering, craven Nightingale, and you justly
remark that close observation of John Bull seems to warrant the
conclusion that the nature of his bovine ancestor is still far from
eliminated from his descendant. And what is the secret of your feeling?
Simply that you hate bullying. Why, then, young gentlemen, do you
bully?
You retort perhaps that fagging is unknown in America, and that
high-spirited youth would not tolerate it. But permit the professor to tell
you what is not unknown in America: a crowd of older young
gentlemen surrounding one younger fellow, forcing him to do
disagreeable and disgusting things, pouring cold water down his back,
making a fool of him to his personal injury, he being solitary, helpless,
and abused--all this is not unknown in America, young gentlemen. But
it is all very different from what we have been accustomed to consider
American. If we would morally define or paraphrase the word America,
I think we should say fair-play. That is what it means. That is what the
Brownist Puritans, the precursors of the Plymouth Pilgrims, left
England to secure. They did not bring it indeed, at least in all its fulness,
across the sea. Let us say, young gentlemen, that its potentiality, its
possibility, rather than its actuality, stepped out of the Mayflower upon
Plymouth Rock. But from the moment of its landing it has been
asserting itself. You need not say "Baptist" and "Quaker." I understand
it and allow for it all. But fair-play has prevailed over ecclesiastical
hatred and over personal slavery, and what are called the new

questions--corporate power, monopoly, capital, and labor--are only new
forms of the old effort to secure fair-play.
Now