AN INCONSISTENCY.

AT the Alumni dinner in 1874, the first that was held in Memorial Hall, the question was discussed as to whether the erection of a hall here at college to commemorate those who had fallen in the late war would tend to keep alive the unpleasant recollections of the war, and whether Southern men would be debarred by it from the University.

This question was answered negatively by Judge Devens, and more particularly by General Bartlett. These gentlemen sustained their position by announcing the principle, - that it is the spirit not the cause, which makes the glory of fighting; Southerners, they held, would feel no mortification from the erection of the hall, for they would appreciate that those in whose memory it was built, though they fought against the South, did so from principle; the Southerners too, being actuated by a like principle, would deserve and receive like praise; it was not principle, but the mere circumstance of living in Massachusetts or South Carolina (say), which decided whether a soldier should wear the blue or the gray.

The liberal tone of these speeches led a Southern gentleman, a member of the class of '33, to write to the Nation, pointing out that it would be but consistent with this principle to put up tablets in Memorial Hall to Harvard graduates who had fallen on the Confederate side also. The Nation replied, though indorsing the ground taken by Judge Devens and General Bartlett, "To put up tablets .... to persons whom its builders do not reverence or love - i.e. the Southern dead - would be a kind of absurdity difficult to describe, if it were not an act of hypocrisy."

In this reply the Nation seems to me to be wrong, and not at all consistent with the principle laid down at the Alumni dinner of which it had approved. If it is true that the same praise is due to all who fight in the true spirit, and if our brothers of the South fought in this spirit, how can it be that the builders of Memorial hall - that is, the Alumni and other friends of the University - do not "reverence and love" them, and wherein lies the "absurdity" or the "hypocrisy" of their classmates' setting up tablets to their memory? That such a reply was made by so high an authority I imagine to be largely owing to the time at which it was made. As the Nation said, it is to a great degree a question of feeling, and we must remember feeling has changed since then. We have gone along with marvellous strides in the last two years. Celebrations like that on the 17th of last June, and speeches like those of General Sherman and Fitzhugh Lee, have materially altered our feelings towards the South. The Nation's language was, therefore, the language of 1874, prompted by feeling rather than by reason, as it confesses. Now, in 1876, feeling as well as reason would sustain it in speaking otherwise.

The time is ripe, too, for the College to pay heed to the appeal of its Southern graduate, and to erect tablets to the memory of Harvard graduates who perished in the Confederate cause. Indeed, many late actions of the College are inconsistent with any other course. Last summer our President entertained in Memorial Hall itself a company which had served in the Confederate service, and no "builder" censured him; this same company we students cheered in the yard, and I am sure no one of us is ashamed of so doing. Thus have we acted towards the Southern living, and we have shown our esteem too for the Southern dead. The College has received, officially acknowledged, and hung in Memorial Hall a photograph of the monument to the Confederate soldiers at Charleston. What course of reasoning justifies the placing of this picture in our hall to the memory of the Southern dead in general, and excludes from the same hall tablets commemorative of that part of the Southern dead for which we ought to have the most regard, our own graduates?

Both the principle laid down at the Alumni dinner in 1874 and the policy of the College ever since make it incumbent on Harvard to honor her graduates who fell in the Southern armies (and Mr. Sibley informs me there are many such) in the same manner as she has those who fell in the Northern armies.

Such an action would be particularly appropriate in this year of the Centennial; it would be an action, too, becoming an institution of learning, which ought to lead the way towards advancement and right, and most of all becoming Harvard, the Alma Mater of Sumner, who was the first to feel and impress on the country the duty of reconciliation with the South.

.B.