The Williams College Alumni Association of Boston had its seventeenth annual reunion and dinner in that city on Tuesday evening, President Franklin Carter being among the guests. The venerable Mark Hopkins sent his regrets at his inability to be present, and added: "I would like also, if I might, to say a word in favor of the college idea as it has existed in this country-that is, the idea of an education distinctively liberal. It has been toward the realization of that idea that my life work has been devoted. My wish has been to have here an institution that should have the means of doing and should do for young men in the forming period of their lives the best that can be done for them in four years in the way of a liberal education. What that best may be I have wished might be determined, not by the wishes of the students, but by the combined wisdom of the colleges. That idea I have labored for often under great discouragement, with the impression that it might be realized with a limited amount of money; whereas, if the university idea be admitted, there is no limit to the amount of money which may be used. But this idea, I fear, is becoming obsolete. I fear it is giving place to what seems to me to be a jumble of miscellaneous, high school, and professional teaching, with no power for the formation of character, that will not even aim at it, that must prevent the possibility of giving honestly a common diploma to those who graduate, and that will keep up forever the hungry cry for money from every college in the land."