"SEVERAL Boston clergymen," says a writer in the Watchman, "have been agitating theatre reform. There seems to be need of it. The lowest play ever put before the American public has been acted in Boston for a week or two past, and, if all the reports are true, the students from Harvard College have formed no inconsiderable part of the audience. . . . If there is not discipline enough in the College to keep the students in their rooms, the parents of the young men ought to know that they are out, and govern themselves accordingly." We are used to the misrepresentations of Harvard in the Herald, but, really, a paper like the Watchman, which pretends to respectability, ought to know better. We wish that the Boston clergymen would "agitate" the editor until he knows enough to keep from the columns of his paper statements which are not only false but preposterously absurd. We should like to inform the Watchman: 1st, that the students of Harvard College have not formed a considerable part of the audiences at the performances of the "Black Crook," as will readily be seen from the fact that it would require great effort on the part of one thousand students to form a "considerable part of the audience," for two weeks, in a theatre that holds about twenty-five hundred persons; 2d, that the basis of fact, which the writer's imagination has distorted into the above statement, is that about one hundred Freshmen attended the "Black Crook" on the opening night, in a body, - men who had been here but a little over a month, and therefore did not know any better, and who are in no sense to be taken as representing Harvard College; and 3d, that as Harvard College is neither a boarding-school nor a lunatic asylum, there is decidedly not discipline enough to keep the students in their rooms.
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