And the doctor understood men so well that he never wasted his trouble on those who had nothing in them, but let them drift through the course unnoted.  Expulsions were very rare, and the secret police of the university was so competent that the almost absolute certainty of detection generally deterred the men from serious infractions of the rules.  The government seemed to be based on the policy of giving an earnest man all the advantages to be got out of the institution, and getting the indifferent through the course with the least discredit.  In a state of society in which the collegiate standing was of importance to a man’s career, this condition of things would have been a grave objection to the college, but in our western world the degree had very little importance, and the honors no effect on the future position.  Most of the prominent men of our past had not even been through any university, and in politics it was often rather an obstacle than a recommendation that a man was a “college man.”  What the doctor tried to do, then, was to make a man when he found the material for one, and to ignore the futile intellects.  This was the scheme of the education at Union when I was there, and it rarely failed to find the best men in the class and bring them forward.

Our college life may have been to the men of sufficient means more largely supplied with the elements of excitement, but for the poorer students there was little romance in it.  Now and then a demonstration against an unpopular professor, a “bolt,” i.e. abstention en masse from a recitation; or a rarer invasion of the town and hostile demonstration gave us a fillip, but the doctor had so well policed the college and so completely brought under his moral influence the town, that no serious row ever took place in my time.  Later he told me how he managed one of the worst early conflicts, in which the students on one side of the college road, and the town boys on the other, were arrayed in battle order, determined to fight out the question who were the better men.  The doctor had early notice of the imminent row, and, fetching a circuit behind the “town,” encouraged the boys on that side with assurances of his impartiality and even his satisfaction with a little punishment of the students, if they were aggressive.  “But,” said he, “don’t begin the fight and put yourselves in the wrong.  If my boys come over, thrash them well, but let them strike the first blow.”  Having put them in the strongest defensive attitude, believing that they had the doctor with them, he went round to the students and applied the same inducements to the defensive, leaving them under the persuasion that he entirely approved their fighting, and then he went home and left them to their conclusions.  As time passed and neither took the offensive, they all cooled off and went home.