I look upon the violation of hospitality as one of the seven deadly sins,--a sin for which no punishment is too great; but this sin I have not consciously, and I do not think I have actually, committed. I cannot but suspect, that, if I had employed the language of exclusive eulogy,--such language as is employed at and concerning the Commencement dinners and the Alumni dinners, I might have described the celebration of Class-Day with much more minuteness than I have attempted to do, and should have heard no complaints of violated hospitality. This I would gladly have done, had it been possible. As it was not, I have pointed out those features which seemed to me objectionable,--certainly with no design so ridiculous as that of setting up myself against Harvard University, but equally certainly with no heart so craven as to shrink from denouncing what seemed to me wrong because it would be setting myself against Harvard University. Opinions must be judged by their own weight, not by the weight of the persons who utter them. The fair fame of Harvard is the possession of every son and daughter of Massachusetts, and the least stain that mars her escutcheon is the sorrow of all. But Harvard is not the Ark of the Covenant, to be touched only by consecrated hands, upon penalty of instant death. She is honorable, but not sacred; wise, but not infallible. To Christo et Ecclesiae, she has a right; to Noli me tangere, she has none. A very small hand may hurl an arrow. If it is heaven-directed, it may pierce in between the joints of the armor. If not, it may rebound upon the archer. I make the venture, promising that I shall not follow the example of that President of Harvard who died of a broken heart, because, according to Cotton Mather, he "FELL UNDER THE DISPLEASURE OFCERTAIN GOOD MEN WHO MADE A FIGURE IN THAT NEIGHBORHOOD."As it may never again happen to me to be writing about colleges, I desire to say in this paper everything I have to say on the subject, and therefore take this opportunity to refer to the practice of "hazing," although it is but remotely connected with Class-Day. If we should find it among hinds, a remnant of the barbarisms of the Dark Ages, blindly handed down by such slow-growing people as go to mill with their meal on side of the saddle and a stone on the other to balance, as their fathers did, because it never occurred to them to divide the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should be surprised; but "hazing" occurs among boys who have been accustomed to the circulation of ideas, boys old enough and intelligent enough understand the difference between brutality and frolic, old enough to know what honor and rage mean, and therefore I cannot conceive how they should countenance a practice which entirely ignores and defies honor, and which not a single redeeming feature. It has neither wisdom nor wit, no spirit, no genius, no impulsiveness, scarcely boyish mirth.
A narrow range of stale practical jokes, lighted up by no gleam of originality, seems to be transmitted from year to year with as much fidelity as the Hebrew Bible, and not half the latitude allowed to clergymen of the English Established Church. But besides its platitude, its one over-powering and fatal characteristic is its intense and essential cowardice.
Cowardice is its head and front and bones and blood. One boy does not single out another boy of his own weight, and take his chances in a fair stand-up fight. But a party of Sophomores club together in such numbers as to render opposition useless, and pounce upon their victim unawares, as Brooks and his minions pounced upon Sumner, and as the Southern chivalry is given to doing. For sweet pity's sake, let this mode of warfare be monopolized by the Southern chivalry.
The lame excuse is offered, that it does the Freshmen good,--takes the conceit out of them. But if there is any Class in College so divested of conceit as to be justified in throwing stones, it is surely not the Sophomore Class. Moreover, whatever good it may do the sufferers, it does harm, and only harm, to the perpetrators; and neither the Law nor the Gospel requires a man to improve other people's characters at the expense of his own. Nobody can do a wrong without injuring himself; and no young man can do a mean, cowardly wrong like this without suffering severest injury. It is the very spirit of the slaveholder, a dastardly and detestable, a tyrannical and cruel spirit. If young men are so blinded by custom and habit that a meanness is not to them a meanness because it has been practised for years, so much the worse for the young men, and so much the worse for our country, whose sweat of blood attests the bale and blast which this evil spirit has wrought.