delegates to explain to the Freshmen, collectively and individually, what manner of place they had come to, and what its ideas were, what self-government meant and what their part in it should be.

But the Freshmen had no basis of experi

ence.

They had never seen the working of self-government. They had not spent hours discussing the wisdom of it. They had not fought for it in meetings and out, nor had the suspense of waiting for the faculty to decide the question, nor the joy of final victory. Self-government really had no halo in their eyes, and while they listened dutifully to what was told them, they were really not to blame if they carried out the ideas rather imperfectly.

The problem last year seemed as troublesome as ever. But by remembering their own Freshmen days, the students hit upon what seems to be the real solution. Several of the upper-class girls of their own accord have sacrificed a precious year on the campus to go down to the village and live with the Freshmen. They have no intention of prating or preaching. But they have come to realize, as the faculty did, perhaps, sometime ago, that Freshmen must measure their inexperience against experience, in order to grow. At Oxford they unceremoniously turn the Seniors into town to make way for the Freshmen who need to have the drilling in college traditions which only campus life can give them. An American faculty would hesitate to use such measures. The Wellesley faculty would probably have felt scarcely justified in asking these girls to go to the village, wise as they might have thought it. But in this self-governing game of vice versa which opens students' eyes to many things that were hidden, volunteers were found to do the expedient thing not only willingly, but cheerfully.

This is but one of many examples of the different point of view which self-government brings. If history were really frank it would probably show that friction between teacher and taught went back to the time of Diogenes and his tub, and as far back of that as there were master and pupil. The difficulty is that in this relation, neither subordinate nor superior can see things as the other sees them. But in self-government, presto! the scene is shifted. The students see as the faculty saw, and, as their own judges, inflict severer penalties than the faculty would ever have dreamed of inflicting.

In its way this severity is both good and bad. It impresses on any doubtful mind the dignity and seriousness of the association. Just as the dollar fine for the girl who "forgets" to register helps very much to fix selfgovernment resolutions in her memory, so in more delicate cases of discipline where character and influence enter in as well as the breaking of rules, stern justice is often most wholesome. But young and untried minds are sometimes crude in their judgment. Their rules for right and wrong are sharply drawn. They have not always the perspective of mercy, which comes with maturity, to temper their justice, and they sometimes do not secure the benefits that would be gained by a gentler handling of the case. Yet responsibility and experience are likely to develop caution and temperateness of conclusion before the officers of the Self-government Association have served a great while, and radicals often become conservatives by the time their term is over.

Self-government is a good school for the development of many excellent qualities. Decisions are so far-reaching that they cannot be entered into lightly. It takes independence of thought, either natural or acquired, to outline a policy, tact to carry it out, and a keen understanding of human nature to deal with personal issues successfully. If culprits, while their judges are still in the formative period, suffer from unscientific treatment, the discontent is no greater than when a decision is displeasing under faculty rules, and the offender at least has the satisfaction of feeling that she brought the trouble on her own head by helping to elect such a short-sighted per

son.

A

A quickening of the sense of honor is one of the surest results of self-government. college boy was telling one day of the attempts of some of the men he knew, even when they had learned their lesson, to cheat in a certain class, just for the joy of cheating. "Why do they do it?" he was asked. 'Well," he answered, "Professor X. is a regular spy. He's always looking out for cheating, and it's a good game to do it right under his nose." "Do they cheat in Professor A.'s class?" the boy was asked. He drew himself up, (6 Professor A. is a gentleman," he answered. "He puts us on our honor. No man with a spark of decency would dream of cheating him.”

It is the working of the same spirit that

makes self-government successful. A girl who, under faculty rule, without a prick of conscience, would smuggle in the most distant cousins as members of her own family," to gain the privileges of such relationship, became as rigid as a Puritan when she fully saw the reasons for the resolution that she should not receive "cousins" in her study without a chaperon, and helped to fix it by her vote. The "members of her own family" suffered immediate diminution, to the sorrow of her quondam brothers and the saving of her conscience.

Just why it is that girls in a land where the laws are made without their help, should be antagonistic to faculty rules which are made for their special benefit and protection, is a question for psychologists. But whatever the reason, the fact remains that college rules even to some girls with a nice sense of the fitness of things seem made to be evaded. Evasion, too, appears to be some way to their credit, and detection only blameworthy. With self-government rules, the pleasure of breaking them is over. It is no longer a game of hide and seek, with hurrah! for the one that gets the best of it, when every girl is made her own policeman to carry out the rules she herself has helped to make.

With the making of rules comes the sense of responsibility, which few girls avoid entirely. When the Incorrigible went from a certain boarding-school to a certain college, her reputation went with her. She was too jolly and merry not to be lovable, but she was rightly named. She had broken all the rules of the school, and spent her Saturdays indoors studying as a penance. "It was worth the fun," was all she said when the girls pitied her. In college she started in promptly on her rule-breaking career. She thrummed her banjo and sang coon songs in study hours, and when the distracted girl who kept order in the corridor reproached her, she smiled. The next day she gathered in some kindred spirits for an improvised orchestra of three pieces, consisting of a comb, a tin horn, and a chafing dish and spoon. The student president of the house protested forcibly and angrily, and the Incorrigible offered her fudge. "If you don't look out, you'll have to go before the president of the association," said one of her admiring companions. "What will you do then?" "Oh, laugh or box her ears, I don't know which," was the Incorrigible's disrespectful reply.

When a boisterous party after ten, for which the candidates were obliged to do Apache war whoops, really brought the Incorrigible before the president of the association, she did neither. She cried hot sudden tears, and that no teacher had ever been able to make her do. When the president had finished the interview the Incorrigible had forfeited her name. She submitted to changing her room as a proper penalty for her sins of commission, and was duly grateful to be spared faculty supervision.

"You could not escape it next time," said the president, who was very wise in her own generation. "But there never will be a next time. You're too honest to break your own rules. Anyway, the association has a lot to do, and we simply must have your help."

"It's queer to have your equal for your judge," was the Incorrigible's comment afterwards in her own room. "It has a curious tendency to diminish your self-respect."

Once the Incorrigible had found that the business of government was as interesting as breaking rules, she threw herself into it heart and soul. It was the same energy that had been misdirected before, but, given a lawful channel, it brought her to much power in the association and much glory in the college. It was just another illustration of the principle which is being more and more applied, that responsibility is the best cure for irresponsibility, and that if you want to cure a rebel, the quickest way is to set her to governing.

If self-government can prevent friction with the faculty, develop honor and independence and responsibility and wisdom in the students, and is so satisfactory in all its workings, why does not every college welcome it with open arms? Because there are two sides to every question, is the answer, even to self-government, and admitting all its good points, objections are not difficult to find. One of them lurks even in the unqualified approval of the system, expressed by the head of the college which first adopted it.

"Approve of self-government?" she said. "Why, I think it is the only kind. I don't believe our girls would submit to being governed."

"Submit," the non-advocate would cry. "Bless me, why shouldn't they submit? They would submit at home. Why should they be emancipated from obedience to their superiors because they happen to enter on the next stage of their education? As for its

an un

developing independence, a college girl usually has all the independence she can manage. Independence raised to pleasant degree may become aggressiveness. Let her learn to be governed before she governs."

Over-independence is not a bugbear that need frighten the advocates of self-government seriously. The reciprocal relation of obedience and authority which the system secures is likely to prevent it, as well as the wholesome lessons administered informally by the students to teach the aggressive girl that she is trespassing on the right of others. The habit of making one's own rules may cause more than a tinge of dislike for readymade rules, and this attitude may work havoc with a girl's comfort for the first few months after college. But the impartiality and openness of mind which self-government has encouraged will help her sooner, it may be, than otherwise, to accept her place in society and the home and to see the justice of laws made by a majority of which she was not one.

Another objection to self-government is that it puts a heavy burden on girls who with the ordinary measure of college work and play have all the obligations that body and brain. and nerves can meet. This objection cannot be so easily dismissed. The government of a college, when it is carried on by the college, with all its experience in governing, takes a good deal of time and work and thought on the part of a number of members of the faculty. When it is transferred to the students it cannot go on by itself. The same amount of time and effort must be put upon it as before. Vassar students discovered this when the extension of their powers was under discussion. Chapel there is compulsory, and a record of the attendance is kept by monitors who are paid for their work. There was some thought of putting the matter into the hands of the students, though without giving them power to make chapel optional. When they found that the mere giving and receiving of excuses and the serving of notices on delinquents took a large share of the working hours of several people, they entirely lost their zeal for managing chapel under the present circumstances.

Even when the greatest freedom is allowed, and the machinery of government is reduced to a minimum, there is plenty to do in running wisely a community of four hundred or eight hundred or a thousand girls. Students

are not dropped into the association as if it were a hopper and then forgotten. They must be recorded and considered, and that means clerical work to begin with. They must be orderly members of the community, and that means oversight and watchfulness on the part of the "proctors" whom the house elects to be its guardians. But the questions of discipline, of precedent and example, of making regulations and changing them, which have taken all the seasoned experience that the faculty could summon, are what weigh on the unaccustomed minds of student legislators and judges. The honor of rising to power in the association is very great. It means the highest confidence that students can show in the ability and integrity and impartiality of those they choose. But the head that wears the crown is heir to problems and perplexities that make more than one observer consider whether it is wise to put so heavy a sceptre in the hands of a college girl.

As far as governing goes, the rule of the majority in a college community is usually sane and wholesome. Its decisions are just and its legislation thoughtful and satisfactory. Factions keep things interesting, as they do in other organizations, and discussions wax hot and heavy, but in the end the best opinion usually prevails.

Bryn Mawr has met with some difficulties in its twelve years of self-government. But so far it has weathered them successfully. The student community is made up of undergraduates and graduate students, and for a time the relation of the graduates to self-government threatened to interrupt its smooth progress. Graduates as graduates do not appeal particularly to the undergraduate's mind. They might give that balance and maturity to their younger sisters which sunny optimists believe they do, if their younger sisters cared to affiliate with them, but they usually do not. A.M.'s, and Ph.D.'s are excellent things to have in college. They give it prestige and add distinction to the catalogue, and make an excellent centre for enthusiasm when they acquire fellowships and other honors. The students recognize this, but in every-day relations they find these delvers for degrees rather a troublesome factor. Of course there are delightful individual exceptions, but the "Grads " as a class are not overpopular. Though they live in the same hall with the other students, they are apart from them in their tastes, and are likely to make their

strongest impression on a fun-loving girl as "those creatures who want the corridors as quiet as an undertaker's all the time."

At first the graduates had very little to say about self-government. They were obliged to come under all the rules of the association from which their age might ordinarily have emancipated them, and yet their power in the association was very small. The matter was finally adjusted by providing that two members of the advisory board must be graduates, and that graduates might be elected to serve on the executive board. The basis for future harmony was laid and is kept secure by the custom of making one member of the board a graduate.

Questions of this kind, caused by the makeup of the community, are more or less frequent in self-government. The consciousness of different points of view was brought home to the Wellesley students at the beginning of their self-government career by a very earnest debate on the chaperon question. Many of the Western girls had not had chaperons since they outgrew their nurses, and they could not see why grown girls who were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves should be personally conducted to a ball game or some other entertainment by a chaperon, as if they were in pinafores. Yet realizing what the conventionalities in the East demanded, and feeling the responsibility for the good conduct of the college strong upon them, they accepted the majority vote of the association and agreed to the adoption of chaperons as a necessary evil.

Concessions and compromise and the adjustment of the individual for the sake of the whole are some of the best lessons of selfgovernment, and lessons that are constantly being learned. That the government is administered so fairly in a self-governing college is mainly due to the fine public spirit of the student body. Honor is contagious. For shame, if nothing else, an alien swings into line with her more conscientious companions. But the students are well aware also that what the faculty gave the faculty may take away. The fear of losing self-government is an excellent restraint, and the constant necessity of showing themselves worthy, of living. up to what the classes have done before them, is a strong incentive to the pride of the students. The power behind the throne, too, weighs heavily in the balance. The influence of those in charge of the college is strong in

self-government as it is in any other kind of government. Not exerted directly or definitely, it is, however little the students realize it, the mainspring which determines the whole policy of student government.

Exceptions are sometimes as necessary as the rule itself, and Bryn Mawr has partially overcome the difficulty of making them by giving to the president, with certain limitations, discretionary power. Still even that has its drawbacks. It is at least amusing that a graduate of several years' standing, invited to attend the theatre with one of the members of the faculty, should be obliged to ask permission of the student president of the association before accepting, because of the resolution "that students shall make no social engagements with the men of the faculty." The graduate students, many of them, might be trusted to get much profit and stimulus from social relations with the men of the faculty. But for the sake of the foolish ones of their own number, and the undergraduates for whom such prohibition is useful, the rule must be made to cover all. When the government is more strongly paternal a rule can be made much more easily to fit the individual rather than the individual the rule.

Self-government to be successful must be granted, not bestowed. Its efficiency is measured, in the first place, by the interest of the student community. The system means a great deal of extra care and responsibility, and without the enthusiasm which results in an urgent request for self-government, the experiment is likely to come to grief. Another condition for success is the presence of enough girls with conscience, foresight, and good judgment to steer public opinion into safe channels. Continuance of interest is not always easy to secure. Usually the many in any body find it easier to let the few do the thinking and the work for them. Judging from the paragraphs in the Wellesley paper urging students to attend self-government meetings, and the satirical references in some of the Bryn Mawr publications to those who stay away, these two colleges, like others, are having to meet the problem of keeping the interest general.

The record of the past intimates the future, but does not insure it. Wellesley has made a good record during its short experience, but the real test will come when the first enthusiasm of winning student government no longer stimulates the victors, and the system becomes

a less dramatic part of the routine of college life than at present. Bryn Mawr, it is true, has carried on self-government successfully for a dozen years. But even Bryn Mawr has not proved the efficacy of self-government for all time. The Bryn Mawr students to whom self-government was granted, twelve years ago, had more of the pioneer responsibility and earnestness than the Bryn Mawr girls of to-day need to have. A college course for girls has grown so much more customary during these years, that those who go are no longer merely the picked students of a school or community. College girls to-day are likely to be younger and less serious than the older generation, using college very often as a stepping-stone to general culture rather than to a teacher's position or any other moneyearning occupation. It still remains to be seen how firmly fixed self-government is in the groundwork of the college, and whether such girls, as they increase in number, at Bryn Mawr as well as elsewhere, will be as anxious to tread its strenuous paths.

With Bryn Mawr, self-government was a natural consequence of its particular creed. Its ideal was equal scholarship for men and women. From its very beginning it ran counter to many of the time-honored prejudices clinging about women's colleges, and, quite logically, more freedom for the students accompanied the independent attitude of the college on other matters. For Wellesley, selfgovernment was a particularly fortunate step, because it contradicted so completely what was unprogressive and narrowing in the oldest traditions of the college.

At Smith College, self-government is principally conspicuous by its absence, perhaps because dissatisfaction with existing conditions is not lively enough to warrant a revolution. If the colleges were graded according to the amount of student government, Smith would stand at the bottom of the list. Self-government has been tried to a very slight extent in some of the houses. But in the government as a whole the students participate only through the senate which they elect. The duties of the members of the senate are to ascertain the opinion of the students, to present it to a committee of the faculty appointed to confer with them, and to carry the decision of the faculty back to the students. This is faculty rule, surely. Yet up to this time the students have not felt the discomfort of it keenly enough to wish to change. VOL. XXXVIII.—45.

Furthermore, a vote to test the student feeling about self-government was overwhelmingly against it. Smith, unlike Wellesley or Vassar, does not need self-government as a corrective for an over-abundance of rules, as it has always had so few. The ten-o'clock rule is still in force, but is suspended so often that it is not usually troublesome. The necessity for asking permission to leave Northampton overnight is sometimes trying to independent spirits, but neither of these regulations seems as burdensome to the students as would selfgovernment, even if the faculty were willing to grant it. The Smith community, also, is so scattered that it would be difficult to apply the system as the other colleges use it. The main building at Vassar is really the centre of the college life, and the halls are merely its tributaries. Chapel is held there, and the girls from the houses stay afterwards to dance and study in the library, or to listen to a lecture and meet the lecturer afterwards. This social centralization makes a unified body which it is comparatively easy to imbue with self-government ideas. At Wellesley, too, something the same conditions prevail. Although Bryn Mawr has no central building, the college is so small that it is easy to reach its circumference. But at Smith, the different house groups on the campus and in the town are like a federation of States, and it would take a very complex system of government to comprehend them. The college now might be said to be ruled by public sentiment, and to any one accustomed to its workings its efficiency would be surprising. It seems to be the feeling of some of the most thoughtful Smith girls that absence of machinery is quite as creditable as the presence of it, and that since they obtain the same results as a self-governing college without any elaborate fortification of organization and rule, it is wise to let well enough alone.

Self-government is excellent in many ways and for many colleges. At its best it develops self-control and patience and loyalty and public spirit. It makes a girl a power in the game instead of a pawn, a centre of action, not of protest.

Nowhere, perhaps, except in democratic America would a college dare to put the reins of government so confidently into the hands of its students, and it is a tribute to the training and character of American college girls that no self-governing college yet has had reason to regret its trust.