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     While it does not follow that no legislative measures are necessary to remedy defects in our laws, which this crime discovers, there is need of much wisdom to avoid ill-advised and hasty action. More stringent penalties for assault upon the Chief Magistrate of State or Nation would seem advisable, not in the hope that greater severity of punishment would deter a fanatic such as Czolgosz, but because inadequacy of legal punishment furnishes an excuse for popular passion to suggest, or even to practise, lynching. And every such suggestion leads to greater disrespect for law and authority, reverence for which such terrible events as this ought rather to deepen and intensify. It is probably true, as is sometimes suggested, that a diminished respect for authority, a tendency to encourage undue freedom from restraint, and a less appreciation of the value of discipline are characteristic of the times. Greater regard for the rights of the young is apt to lead, in the home, to less regard for what is due from children in the way of respect toward their elders and of obedience toward their parents. The effort of the teacher to interest and instruct the pupil leads frequently to cultivating the line of least resistance, even to the omission of those tasks the successful accomplishment of which develops the mental fibre and the character necessary to good scholarship. The election of studies, now so common in many colleges, yields ample opportunity for many students to tread easy paths, and to avoid that discipline of severe study which is the most valuable feature of a young man’s education. That our Institute avoids material error in this direc- [394][395] tion is a matter of common knowledge. The necessity for earnest, faithful work, for care and precision, whether in calculation or in manipulation, which the inevitableness of natural law compels and which the student of applied science must early recognize, is disciplinary in a high degree, and tends to build character as well as to develop brain.