Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/164

 satility was nothing to wonder at in those self-reliant days before the swarm of “experts” and “specialists” had overrun the land—days when the cook repaired the college clock, and the learned but horny-handed President himself toiled many a weary hour in laying stone wall and running candles.

The champions of the status quo pointed out—and with perfect truth—that the low price of Commons kept down the price of board in Cambridge, but apparently did not perceive that the low price of board in Cambridge was one of the chief inducements for that desertion of Commons against which they were constantly striving. They seem to have been obsessed with the idea that malnutrition was a part of education, that plain living somehow guaranteed high thinking, and that however much the concomitants of learning, like the Spartan boy’s fox, might gnaw into the vitals of the learner, no outcry was to be expected. At the same time, they had an uneasy feeling that wisdom was not a complete substitute for beef and potatoes. The horns of their dilemma were well defined by Edward Johnson, as early as 1650: “To speak uprightly, hunger is sharp, and the head will retain little learning, if the heart be not refreshed in some competent measure with food, although the gross vapors of a glutted stomack are the