Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/196

 in which Commons occupied the second Harvard Hall. Dining accommodations were now ample for the whole College. This was the time of storm and stress, marked by bungling but determined attempts on the part of the authorities to enforce the rules, and by almost equally determined opposition on the part of the commoners. Two great wars, during this interval, convulsed the community without the college walls, while within them occurred repeated conflicts of fully proportionate severity.

The last period, that of the “decline and fall,” opens with the transfer of Commons to University Hall, and includes about a third of a century. By this stage the whole business had become a white elephant, and the authorities withdrew more and more from its management; until, under the equally inexpert hands of outside speculators, it proved a flat failure, and was abandoned as a total wreck.

So perished the long-continued and desperate effort to engraft upon the American university one of the most wholesome, delightful, and permanent elements of the English college. And yet the judicious critic will remark that it was not the true system of Commons that