STUDENTS' ROOMS.

A recent number of the Boston Journal contains a letter on the scarcity of students' rooms at Harvard and the need of new dormitories. At present but 543 students out of the 928 in the college catalogue are accommodated in the college dormitories. As a result the lodging-house keepers who accommodate the rest of the students have been from time to time raising their rates until their demands have become so extortionate as to make the price of living at Harvard so high as to turn away men to other colleges. The writer in the Journal thinks some means should be devised by which the lodging-house keepers be compelled to be more reasonable in their demands.

"In mediaeval times, when students flocked to the universities by thousands, the extortions by lodging-house keepers became intolerable, and energetic measures were devised to repress them, as at Oxford, at Paris and at Bologna. Students do not yet flock to Harvard in such multitudes; but the growth of the university in recent years has been so rapid and the increase in the number of students has been so great, that the available means of personal accommodation have been quite unequal to the demand. This fact undoubtedly reflects high honor upon the faculty, instructors and government of the institution, but it may be a question whether this very success may not in itself work out its own limit. It is not too much to say that at the present time (the college dormitories being full) comfortable apartments for many of the students who are gathering there are not to be obtained within a convenient distance from the recitation and lecture rooms at any price. The lodging houses in which rooms can be obtained at all are in general cheap wooden structures of ancient date, low studded, small and dingy; and yet the rent of a fifteen-foot room in one of these structures is often as much as a whole house of similar pattern would let for anywhere else in the suburbs."

The success of such buildings as Little's Block, Hilton and Beck shows that dormitories are in demand. The writer then goes on to compare the rents of rooms at Harvard with that at English universities. "The rent of rooms in the college dormitories ranges from $300 downward. At Oxford, the most expensive university in Europe, room rent is not nearly so high; the highest priced rooms in Christ Church College, the costliest of all, being but pound18 18s., about $95; at Balliol the total average cost of furnished rooms is about pound20-$100; at Magdalene the highest priced rooms are pound15, or $75, and so on through the twenty and more colleges and halls. In short, the room rent for students at Harvard is two or three times as great as at Oxford. At Oxford all lodging houses in which students are permitted to reside are licensed, and the rents and management supervised by officers of the university; a method which is quite practicable at Harvard, without trenching upon private rights."

The writer seems to think that the reason the college does not erect more dormitories is that it is waiting for "public-spirited friends" to do it for her. There is plenty of available land and all that is needed is the money to build with.