The most tolerant man of the world
could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the
vices were less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking
-- though the mere recollection of it made him doubt his own
veracity, so fantastic it seemed in later life -- may have done
no great or permanent harm; but the habit of looking at life as a
social relation -- an affair of society -- did no good. It
cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had
helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and
instincts of any profession -- such as temper, patience,
courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
opponents -- it would have been education better worth having
than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make
anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent
through life. The Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained
a collegian, if he stuck only to what the college gave him. If
parents went on generation after generation, sending their
children to Harvard College for the sake of its social
advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite as
ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.
Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable,
and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the
mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those
who liked it.
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