Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: V THE GOVERNMENT OF STUDENTS flpHE history of the government of the students J- in American colleges is a history of increasing liberality and orderliness. The government of the colonial period was of a kind like the civil government. It was minute in its inspection of students, and severe in its punishments. It was in order at Harvard College, at or about 1674, for the President or the Fellows to punish recreant students either by fine or by whipping, as the nature of their offenses should require. Each case was to be represented, in case of a pecuniary amount, by a fine not to exceed ten shillings, or, if corporal punishment were the penalty, by ten stripes. This whipping, too, was to be clone openly. Judge Sewall, in his diary, says that in 1674 a student was publicly whipped for speaking blasphemous words. In addition to this castigation he was suspended from taking his bachelor’s degree, and suffered also certain other evil consequences. The execution of the sentence was quite as characteristic as its nature. The sentence was read twice publicly in the library, in the presence of allthe students and representatives of the government.‘ The offender knelt, the President prayed, and the blows were laid on. The services were closed with another prayer by the President. Gradually corporal punishment passed out of use, but it was near the beginning of the last century when this form of penalty ceased.1 The offenses against college laws and procedure were of various sorts, and related in a far more intimate degree to personal character and behavior than would now be suffered. In the first third of the last century the students were subjected to a close inspection by their tutors. Tutors are directed to see that the students retire early to their chambers on Saturday evening, …