Excerpt from The Yale Literary Magazine, Vol. 26: April, 1861There is no place where such a command ought to receive more obedience, no place where' the world has a right to expect that it will receive more obedience, than in an American College. Founded, as the College was, in subordination to the State, it is its business, not to raise men above the duties and responsibilities of citizens, but the bet ter to qualify them for their successful discharge, and self-knowledge should, therefore, be the Alpha and Omega of every College educa tion. Every man is his own greatest mystery, and there are many who are termed learned and wise, who have no intelligent knowledge of themselves. There are few if any deliberately made wrecks in life, and the vast majority of human ruins must acknowledge a common cause. The practical question, then, which comes to us, as we stand here behind the curtain, is simply this: are we ready now to act the parts we have so long been studying or dreaming over, and if not, rests the fault with ourselves, or with some power beyond our control?If, as they tell us, human nature has always been much as we find it among ourselves, what a collection of men have left this their Alma Mater, vainly trying to shake the dust from off their feet, and to lay the blame of all their imperfections upon the system of education nu der which they have lived. If they have been enabled to persuade themselves that they were blameless, and were erred against by the powers that be, happy for them, for otherwise they would be desti tute of both followers and sympathy.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.