Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/78

 This generally non-belligerent attitude of the early collegians is the more noticeable when compared with the enthusiasm shown by their contemporaries in the old country, on whom their conduct was supposed to be so closely modelled. Oxford in particular turned out an inspiring number of student volunteers to fight for their King in the Civil War. One fifth of the undergraduates at Christ Church took commissions; and in 1642 “a corps of four hundred and fifty men connected with the University as scholars or servants had been organized.” Still, at the younger university several powerful reasons combined to make the students pacifists. The exemption law (which had no parallel in England), the college orders, evidently reinforced by graduate opinion, and the general ineptitude of the whole militia system, not to mention the difficulty of providing themselves with the necessary “armor, breasts, backs, headpieces, and blunderbusses,” kept them even from participating in the trainings of the local Cambridge company.

Parenthetically, that company did very well without them. It is a kind of civic paradox that the town most noted for such a peaceful institution as a university has bulked so large in warlike memorabilia. Here assembled the first American army, and here Washington took command. Here was designed and first displayed the “Cambridge Flag,” from which was later evolved our