Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/112

 Grimly, and with infinite pains, they shouldered their racial burden of tradition, and set their feet in the path of precedent. We can see to-day that it would have been far easier, at any rate in the beginning, to adopt a modification of the Continental plan, and let the students live with the townspeople, who would have watched conscientiously over their bodily and spiritual welfare. But the first settlers had all the passion for conventionality that has distinguished your true-born Briton in every age and clime. Indubitably, had it then been the custom at home, the Pilgrim Fathers, battling for dear life with the wilderness and the Indian, would have paused every evening to dress for dinner. Clearly, then, their college must be after the exact model of the colleges they had left behind them. (Savage estimates that when Harvard was established there were some forty or fifty Cambridge graduates, and nearly as many Oxford men, in the immediate neighborhood.) They must have all the old parental restrictions—to say nothing of several new ones suggesting the tremulous solicitude of a maiden aunt.

As a result, they instantly plunged their educational venture into all manner of unnecessary difficulties.