people, "Thou shalt do no murder," they might still be worth saving. We should not despise any one who honestly performs his duty, however menial.

But what is to be done with them? The Constitution can be amended so as to deprive all who teach in colleges of freedom of speech; or a censorship might be set up, and a penal establishment might be opened in Alaska, on the Muscovite plan, for such professors as incurred its displeasure. To many of us my neighbors who frequent the village grocery, for example - free speech is still precious, and even those who, like myself, incline to reticence, deem it safer that a hundred fools should be allowed to utter their folly than that possibly one wise man should be gagged. To turn the professors out and put the editors in their places would be no remedy, for though the former are omniscient and the latter ignorant, the talking difficulty would remain. But here we verge on the humorous, and must forbear.

Since free speech concerns many millions, and only a few professors at the utmost can abuse it, we had better let it remain. There is always the chance, moreover, that one or another of these poor fellows may, unwittingly, say something worth heeding.

After all, to us graduates who remember the past generation, there is nothing new, nothing alarming in this recent episode. Certain newspapers have always been dreadfully anxious about the loyalty and patriotism of Harvard College, and a few Harvard men, with a tendency towards journalism rather than towards culture, have always been going into hysterics over the Toryism of Harvard Professors. In 1860 we heard similar denunciation; did facts justify it? Let me take down Dr. Brown's "History of Harvard University in the War of 1861-1865,” and quote this

summary:

NUMBER OF STUDENTS ENGAGED IN THE SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES.

DIED ON THE BATTLEFIELD, IN HOSPITALS, OR ELSEWHERE, AS THE RESULT OF WOUNDS, OR OF DISEASE CONTRACTED IN THE SERVICE.

That is the answer which Facts gave to Prophecy: 1,232 Harvard men, out of about 4,000 of military age, enlisted for the Union. Can any other set of men show so large a proportion? Did thirty-five per cent. of all the journalists in the country, for instance, go to the war? The experience of those times taught me two things which may be worth recording: First, Sensitiveness to national honor is not incompatible with dulness to personal honor; second, The loudest talkers stayed at home, the roar and turmoil and grim activity of the battlefield form an environment unfavorable to talk.

Thus when some patriotic Loquax springs up in these days and clamors for war, I reflect that his precursors, when the crisis came, were slow to enlist. I remember that Shaw and Bartlett and Charles Russell Lowell, and Barlow, lately dead, were men of deeds, not words. You will search the newspapers of those times in vain for warwhoops of theirs, or for their sneers at Harvard; but those newspapers will tell you that Shaw died leading the assault at Fort Wagner; that Lowell was shot down in the desperate charge at Cedar Creek; that Barlow was wounded at Antietam, and at Gettysburg was left for dead, and won his major-generalship for bravery at Fair Oaks and Seven Pines; that Bartlett proved his valor at Port Hudson and in the Crater at Petersburg, not less than in Libby Prison. Go into Memorial Hall and read the tablets there; they bear the names of men who preferred silence, and who were, above all, men of peace. Such men have been in the past the true guardians of Harvard's honor, the best exemplars of Harvard's patriotism; by such as they, and not by the talkative and pugnacious, will her precious heritage be kept spotless now and forever.

VOL. IV. NO. 15. 25

THE HASTY PUDDING CLUB'S CENTENNIAL.

Early in the autumn the active members of the Hasty Pudding Club appointed a committee, consisting of J. C. Fairchild, R. H. Hallowell, F. S. Hoppin, Jr., and C. W. Norton, to arrange for the celebration of the Club's centennial. The festivities began on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 22, when Baldwin's Band played, and beer was served at the Clubhouse on Holyoke St. In the evening, at 8 o'clock, more than six hundred graduate and undergraduate members crowded the theatre, where the following committee had provided a varied entertainment: R. Brooks, A. Cox, H. S. Grew, 2d, S. Heckscher, F. S. Hoppin, Jr., and R. B. Williams.

The exercises were opened with

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH BY L. McK. GARRISON, '88.

Fifty years ago, The Hasty Pudding Club celebrated its semi-centennial at the United States Hotel in Boston by a dinner, which was adjourned to the year 1895, so the records, kept by our beloved brother, Professor Child, inform us; and we are now, in the nick of time, invoking the blessings of another half-century upon the Pudding, just as the prayers of our elders are expiring by their own limitation.

There is a lesson for all of us in the two accounts of that celebration which Mr. Janus-Secretary has left us - one for posterity, describing with much gravity its "felicitous remarks" and "happy speeches," and the singing of the customary psalm; and one for his sporting contemporaries, “Martin" (whom we now call Professor Lane), "Tom,” “ Dan,” and "Whit," in which he admits that "the food was poor," the whole affair "stupid," Dr. Warren of the Class of 1797 "long-winded," and Mr. Swett of the Class of 1800 " sappy."

Gentlemen of the Pudding, the graduate of the antique Class of 1888 who now addresses you heeds the warning and will be brief. Brethren of '96, to whom has been intrusted the graver portions of this celebration, while there is yet time, give heed, likewise. I charge you on your lives, let the dinner be good! The ghosts of the founders call to you from the ruins of Porter's Tavern. Spare neither cellar nor larder. This Club began as an eating club. Shall the graduates who have traveled thousands of miles hither be fed on mere sound chameleons' food? Nay; turkies, geese, chickens, plum-puddings, pies, custards, punch, wine ❞— there is a heroic menu of our fathers, a hundred years old, for you to pattern after. Will you shame their memories ?

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This old eating club, whose single dish gave it a name now famous,

began on September 1, 1795, among some half-starved boys, beset with paternal regulations, who longed for a quiet place where they could meet and sing a psalm-tune or two without being fined, and eat food of their own providing. The fare of the Commons was often unbearable — such as one might, perhaps, expect in a little back-country academy to-day. Indeed, Harvard College was then little more than such an institution. Massachusetts, Stoughton, Hollis, and Harvard Halls and Holden Chapel were all there was of Harvard University when this Society began. Cambridge was a village, separated from Boston by a dusty stage roadthe Back Bay, a sheet of water stretching westward from along Charles Street, as far south as the Providence Depot. Holmes Field was a marsh, and Cambridge Common, a cow-pasture.

The Nation itself was not then less primitive than the College. The thirteen seaboard colonies had been scarce twenty years independent. A new government, but six years old, was just beginning to lift the burden of debt which lay upon the land, and to shape the policy which should make it flourish like a green tree. Every one was expectant, but anxious. Politics were grave, and theology was strict. Sunday was a day of gloom. The theatre was under the ban. Therefore we may justly regard the foundation of a humorous club in such political and social environments as little less than a precious anachronism!

The founders were unconscious humorists, however. Their objects, as they stated them in their constitution, were: "To cultivate the social affections and cherish the feelings of friendship and patriotism, being at once the first of duties and sublimest of enjoyments."

Our founders, one might say, were fin de siècle before us, since in 1795 any social meeting, however dreary its amusements may now seem to us, was distinctly revolutionary. If Timothy Pickering had heard of the secret conclaves of the Pudding, he would have denounced them as Jacobinical. True, the early fathers sang a "hymn of Zion" at each meeting, and interlarded their records with Greek and Latin; but when we consider that they met and ate pudding, not merely to sustain life, but for the pleasure of companionship, the wonder is that they met at all. At first they used every Saturday night, at the ringing of the Commons Bell, to gather about a huge pot of pudding, which had been sturdily carried through the streets, slung on a pole between the shoulders of two "providers," all the way from Dame Kidder's or "Sister" Stimson's to the top of some room in Massachusetts or Hollis. This was in lieu of the regular supper at Commons: though it was none so elaborate itself, but that, as its novelty waned, and the alleged "humorous stories" of the members were exhausted, there had to be something invented to keep the interest in the Club going. The contemplation of his own

epitaph turned Tammas Haggart of Thrums into a famous humorist. The bombastic eloquence of the Pudding secretaries of 1797, preserved in precious volumes, became the cause of wit in their successors, out of whose parodies of their fathers' performances grew the triumphs of the Pudding Stage and the levity of the Crocodile.

Suitable to the grave temper of the time, the Pudding's first entertainments were joint debates among its members, which, in spite of the code of fines intended to enforce order and enrich the Club, were soon carried on with such Puritan earnestness and zeal, that the survivors only met on the Club night following one of them. The step from the "chunk of old red sandstone " to the criminal's dock is short. Therefore it was natural that these debates should, in the progress of evolution, give way to the "High Court of Equity" of The Hasty Pudding Club.

This came to pass; and before the last century ended, mock trials were firmly established as the Club's principal diversion, and so continued for nearly fifty years, until the elaborate costuming of judge and witnesses suggested to the minds of Lemuel Hayward and Peter Porter, '45, that a play, however costumed and acted, was better worth while; and, by further process of evolution, the second half-century of the Pudding became an age of Thespian and Terpsichorean achievement which would have made its pious founders turn in their graves to dream of.

The Pudding's "High Court of Equity" had a lax procedure, but assumed an unlimited jurisdiction over matters and personages contemporary or historical. The College dignitaries were brought before its bar charged with horrid offenses against the public peace; and all the causes célèbres in history, from "The Human Race, plaintiff, vs. Adam, defendant," for "wantonness in eating the woful apple;" "Æneas vs. Dido," "Cæsar vs. Brutus," "Charles 1st vs. Cromwell," down to "Matthew Griswold vs. Robert Lyon," for common assault and battery in the halls of the American Congress, came up before its judges in banc for affirmance or reversal.

Edward Everett, Charles Sumner, Caleb Cushing, Mr. AttorneyGeneral Austin, and Wendell Phillips (who was later to become his Brutus), all began their careers of oratory before this Court, whose docket is closed forever. The records comment on the "acuteness," "ingenuity," "fertility of resource and invective," of these young advocates, whose addresses, we are assured, "rivalled Tully." Would that we might, like Peter Ibbetson, go back among those ardent boys and hear their eloquence; and, mingling familiarly with judges and bar, enjoy the rollicking (and as yet unconscious) wit of Holmes and Lowell-the refinement and sensibility of Channing, Buckminster, and Prescott.

The Pudding was very early a patriotic Club. On Washington's Birth