more intimate knowledge that I have had of the commencement, the history and the termination of all such scenes as have occurred in the college with which you are connected, within the last forty years, your impressions of their folly and wickedness would be still deeper and more abhorrent.

Few things are more adapted to show both the infatuation and the atrocity of rebellions in college, than recurring to the origin of most of them. A great majority of them arise from a desire on the part of students, otherwise orderly, to shield from merited discipline the corrupt and profligate of their fellows. A few, perhaps, of the unprincipled and habitually disorderly students have justly incurred the infliction of severe discipline-suspension -or expulsion from the institution. The delinquents have, it may be, some talents, much impudence-and that desperate recklessness which makes them anxious, if they must go, to have companions both in crime and in suffering. A number of their fellow students--perhaps a large number -are fools enough to be made the dupes of these profligates; to make a common cause with them; and to resolve to share their fate. The consequence is, that they do share their fate. All that belong to the combination are sent away from college; and are so far from gaining the end for which they combined, that the result is permanent and hopeless disgrace. Such is the usual history, and

such the invariable result of college rebellions. In a few instances the loss of life, either to some of the rebels, or of the faculty, has been the deplorable consequence.

Now, in this whole matter, there is an amount of complicated folly and wickedness which it is not easy to measure. For, in the first place, as to the original offenders, in whose behalf all this mischief has been perpetrated, they are commonly profligate villains, who ought not to belong to any decent institution, and whose defence, in any form, is infamy; villains, who, instead of being undeservedly or too hastily visited with discipline, ought perhaps, long before to have been sent off in disgrace. In the second place, every step taken by this combination is a high-handed and peculiarly criminal opposition, not only to the laws which its members are bound to obey, but to a faculty, as it were, in mass, who are labouring day and night to promote their welfare, and who are individually and collectively distressed by the insubordination. And in the third place, it is an act of wanton and voluntary suicide. Those who combine and make a common cause with the original delinquents, plunge into the gulf, for the sake of those who have neither generosity nor honesty enough to thank them for the sacrifice, and thus, perhaps, destroy all their own prospects for life, besides inflicting a wound on the hearts

of parents or guardians which can never be healed on this side of the grave.

Nor is this all. No one can tell, when he connects himself with a scene of this kind, but that it may terminate, as was before intimated, in the loss of life. Many months have not elapsed, since, in a rebellion which took place in the university of a neighbouring state, a beloved and highly valued professor lost his life by the murderous hand of a profligate student: and how often the most valuable lives have been put in imminent danger in similar scenes of insubordination and violence, he who is even tolerably acquainted with their history well knows. How infatuated, then, as well as criminal, must be that youth who allows himself to engage in a plan of resistance to lawful authority, which he cannot but know may terminate in the destruction of his own life, or in that of one or more other individuals, a thousand times more precious to their friends and to the community than his own!

The following statement, perfectly in point, cannot fail of commanding the most respectful consideration from every reader who knows the high character of the writer, and who recollects that he speaks on this subject from the most ample experience. The venerable writer speaking of himself, says:

"At the age of seventeen, he left, for the first time, the house of the best of mothers, to go to

Princeton College; and with the sincerest resolution to fulfil all her anxious wishes in his behalf. Towards the close of the first session, some very unworthy young men were dismissed. They contrived, however, to impose upon the great body of the others, and to induce them to believe that they were most unjustly and cruelly treated. What was called a petition was gotten up in their behalf, and offered for the signatures of the rest. Great numbers signed it, scarce knowing its contents. It proved to be such a one as the faculty could not with propriety listen to, or allow to pass unnoticed. We were required to withdraw our signatures; and it was so managed by the leaders of the rebellion, that the college was broken up in confusion, and all returned home. It was then that I felt the excellence of maternal authority, which great numbers felt not, for they did not return. My excellent mother, though mild, yet firm, as she was wont to be, bade me go back, and make atonement for the evil committed. And I went, and confessed my fault, and still live, to exhort other parents, and other sons to 'go and do likewise.' As a warning to the young men of our land, let me say, that it required nearly thirty years to repair the injury done to that institution, by that proceeding of unreflecting and misguided youths. Let me warn them to beware how they ever assemble together for the purpose of consulting how to redress the

supposed wrongs of their fellow students; and, above all, how they set their names to any instrument purporting to be a condemnation of those in authority. Very seldom, indeed, will the Faculty mistake in their judgments concerning those who are the subjects of discipline. All of those for whom the petition alluded to was offered, proved to be most unworthy characters; and in my many and extensive journeys, throughout the length and breadth of our land, since that time, I have met with very many of those who were most zealous in the cause, but never with one who did not condemn and regret the part which he had taken in it."*

Such is the faithful testimony of an eye and ear witness, nay of a deep temporary partaker in the evil deplored. I also, though never, at any period of my college course, a participant in such a scene, can bear testimony equally explicit, and to the same amount. My observation, in all cases, goes to establish the following points:

1. I have never known the rebels to carry their point; that is, I have never known an instance in which they gained the object for which they combined. One of the laws of our college is in the following words:

*"Religious Education," a tract by the Right Rev. William Meade, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the diocese of Virginia.