much of a handful, turned him over to the Law School. Here Sweetman became an autocrat. His professional duties, as popularly understood, he limited to opening the doors in the morning and locking them at night. He was deeply aggrieved if asked even to replace library books left on the tables, and seizing on the maxim so frequently used in Torts, modified it to suit his own purposes thus: Sic utere libris ut me non lædas. But he invented other and higher duties. He attended all the lectures, and subsequently gave the speaker the benefit of his criticism, on both delivery and doctrine. He exercised a general supervision over all matters connected with the school, and in his later years became a terror to everyone in or near it. However, he was at last displaced by the wave of reform that swept over the school about 1870. The keynote of this great series of changes may be given in the words of President Eliot:
Formerly it was not the custom for the President of Harvard College to have anything to do with the professional schools. I remember the first time I went into Dane Hall after I was elected President. It was in the autumn of 1869, a few weeks after the term began. I knocked at a door which many of us remember, the first door on the right after going through the outside door of the Hall, and, entering, received the usual salutation of the ever-genial Governor Washburn, “Oh, how are you? Take a chair!”—this without looking at me at all. When he saw who it was, he held up both his hands with his favorite gesture, and said, “I declare, I never before saw a President of Harvard College in this building!” Then and there I took a lesson under one of the kindest and most sympathetic of teachers.[1]
- ↑ Proceedings at the 260th Anniversary of Harvard College, 96.
