thenticity of the college degree, imposes on the conscientious student a duty he is better off without, and, when it requires every man to certify that he has received no help, defeats in great part its own end by substituting avowed distrust of everybody for distrust of the few and protection of all. Yet I believe, with eagerness, that a college officer should, for every reason, whether of fairness or of mere policy, accept the word of a student so long as he can, and should maintain with him the openest relation compatible with the rights of others. Nor is this belief inconsistent with my attitude toward the Honor System.

These remarks about the Honor System may hint at the justification of the editor in reprinting the essays and addresses. Though the material may be old, the subjects can never lose their freshness so long as youth is youth.

CAMBRIDGE, January, 1913.

L. B. R. BRIGGS.

THE TRANSITION FROM

SCHOOL TO COLLEGE

COLLEGE life is the supreme privilege of youth. Rich men's sons from private schools may take it carelessly, as something to enjoy unearned, like their own daily bread; yet the true title to it is the title earned in college day by day. The privilege of entering college admits to the privilege of deserving college; college life belongs to the great things, at once joyous and solemn, that are not to be entered into lightly.

Now the things that are not to be entered into lightly (such as marriage and the ministry) are often the things that men enter prepared viciously or not prepared at all; and college life is no exception. "There had always lain a

pleasant notion at the back of his head,” says Mr. Kipling of Harvey Cheyne's father, who had left the boy to the care of a useless wife, " that some day, when he had rounded off everything and the boy had left college, he would take his son to his heart and lead him into his possessions. Then that boy, he argued, as busy fathers do, would instantly become his companion, partner, and ally; and there would follow splendid years of great works carried out together, the old head backing the young fire." Such fatal gaps in calculation, common with preoccupied fathers, are not uncommon with teachers, the very men whose lifework is fitting boys for life.

To prepare a boy for examinations that admit to college requires skill, but is easy; to prepare a boy for college is a problem that no teacher and no school has ever solved. In the widest sense, the transition from school to college is almost coincident with the transition from youth

to manhood, - often a time when the physical being is excitable and ill controlled, when the mind suffers from the lassitude of rapid bodily growth, and when the youth's whole conception of his relation to other people is distorted by conceit. Sensitive to his own importance, just beginning to know his power for good or evil, he is shot into new and exciting surroundings, out of a discipline that drove and held him with whip and rein into a discipline that trusts him to see the road and to travel in it. If we add to this the new and alluring arguments for vice as an expression of fully developed manhood, we have some notion of the struggle in which a boy — away from home, it may be, for the first time is expected to conquer. The best school is the school that best prepares him for this struggle; not the school that guards him most sternly or most tenderly, nor the school that guards him not at all, but the school that stead

ily increases his responsibility, and as steadily strengthens him to meet it. The best college is the college that makes him a man.

66

I

The first feeling of a Freshman is confusion; the next is often a strange elation at the discovery that now at last his elders have given him his head. never shall forget," says a noted preacher, "how I felt when I found myself a Freshman, a feeling that all restraint was gone, and that I might go to the Devil just as fast as I pleased." This is the transition from school to college.

In a man's life there must be, as everybody knows, a perilous time of going out into the world; to many it comes at the beginning of a college course; to many

- possibly to most who go to college at all—it has already come at school. The larger and less protected boarding school or academy is constantly threatened with every vice known to a college; the clois tered private school affords, from its lack