morals and discipline of the students have been unfavorably affected, by permitting them to board in private families.[1]
This momentous concession of course knocked the keystone out of the arch. The Faculty, evidently recognizing that the ancient system was doomed, granted permissions so freely that by 1849 less than one sixth of the College was in Commons, and the whole scheme was abandoned. At Yale, we may note, Commons were given up almost simultaneously, under the very similar conviction (as phrased by President Woolsey) that “with all their evils of coarse manners and wastefulness” they “were no essential part of the college, that on the score of economy they could claim no advantage, that they degraded the manners of students and fomented disorder.”[2]
Sound as such reasons undoubtedly were at both institutions, they did not really account for the collapse of Commons in the New England colleges. Granting that the American imitation of the English system had become encrusted with a dismal tradition of dirt and disorder, yet these were results rather than causes. The system itself, though at first more troublesome, was intrinsically just as workable on the banks of the Charles as beside the Cam and the Isis, as shown by the recent
