He

lished by his father, Rev. Matthew Meigs, in 1851. was graduated from Lafayette College in 1871, and one year later was appointed Assistant Professor in the same institution, where he taught till 1876, obtaining during this period his Doctor's degree. On account of the failing health of his father and the consequent falling away of the school in numbers, Dr. Meigs gave up his professorship at Lafayette, and in 1876, at the age of twenty-four, assumed the charge of the school, which was almost the only support of his father's family. The school was in debt, the plant was inadequate, the patronage small, and the prospect disheartening. He was headmaster of the school until his death in 1911, a period of thirty-five years, and under his guidance the school grew from an enrollment of ten to a school of nearly four hundred.

The following quotations are from an article, " John Meigs," by Howard Bement, in American Youth for April, 1912:

'His ambitions, moreover, all tended toward the field of academic activity, and in this field he early displayed talents for instruction, coupled with a driving personal force, which made him at once an inspiring teacher and a tireless and always to be feared drill-master. No student ever slumbered in his classes. The man who went to the recitation with lesson well prepared was lifted up and swept along on the resistless current of his rapid-fire methods; while the ill-starred loafer looked forward to the period with dread, and realized during the recitation more of actual horror than he could possibly have conceived in the anticipation of what was to come. If nature had endowed

him with no ambition to learn, fear of John Meigs soon supplied the defect.

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'He was as tender as a mother; he was as stern as an outraged father. With a boy's real troubles he could be as sympathetic as proverbial motherhood; against a boy's characteristic badness he could strike with a mailed fist. Never was a man more impatient than he with half-hearted application, desultory effort, flabby spiritual fiber, or moral cowardice. His anger, when face to face with these, blazed red; and the frown of his disapproval darkened the boy's whole landscape as the blackness of some Ætna in eruption. To be summoned to 'The Study' always meant something, and, as the boy responded, his heart-searchings were invariably deep. He never quite knew what to expect, unless his dereliction were clear. Then he knew. If he were really in doubt, however, he never could foretell the state of the weather that awaited him. He might be summoned to hear words of encouragement, of which Dr. Meigs' multifarious sources of information told him the boy stood sorely in need. He might have to listen to words of cheer and hope that meant new life and new purpose. On the other hand, he might receive a veritable thunderstorm of rebuke and censure, equally productive of new resolutions. But whatever came to him, the boy invariably left 'The Study' with love and fear still blended in his heart, and with the calming sense that justice had been done. . .

"When he first took the struggling boarding school his father turned over to him, and when a strong and influential clientele was sadly needed, there was entered at the school the son of a man high in the nation's official life. Here was a good reference at a time when one was needed

but John Meigs had the courage to dismiss this boy during his first term at the school, and for a reason with which a man of less courage would have temporized. He had a well-defined theory, even in those early days, about

the presence of boys in his school who were not amenable to the school's purposes and ideals. Boys not amenable were dismissed with a suddenness sometimes startling. . . . John Meigs believed that no bad boy should be kept when there was any possibility of that boy's doing the school any harm. He viewed as sacred the charge committed to him by trusting parents, and could never be brought to see that he had any right even remotely to subject their sons to the dangers of bad companionship. . . .

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To keep the boys busy, whether at work or at play, was a cardinal principle with John Meigs. He permitted loafing neither in the schoolroom nor on the athletic field. Since Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do,' the hands, the hearts, and the heads must never be idle. So it was that a Hill boy's day came to be crowded full. Every hour brought its appointment that must be kept. Tardiness was a sin; inattention and laxness of effort were almost unpardonable. Excuses were minimized; individual responsibility was maximized.

The result of such a moral and intellectual regimen was two-fold, as John Meigs foresaw. Not only did it serve the immediate purpose of the school, to get its boys into college with few or no conditions, but it molded the school's great by-product, character. The return of a comparatively clean sheet when reports of the college entrance examinations came in did not satisfy the Head Master. He wanted to know what, in terms of life, he had made of the boy, the dull boy equally with the bright one. He wanted to know how straight the boy stood up against the moral back-bone he had attempted to supply him. He wanted in the most real sense to be a 'maker of men.' Moral failures of his boys, in college or after, almost broke his heart. To minimize these failures he kept in touch, by correspondence and otherwise, with an innumerable company of Hill graduates. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are the letters written in his own hand, still preserved by old Hill fellows. . . .

"Does it seem anomalous to some of us that this vigorous schoolmaster, this hard-headed business administrator and financier, should be a man of prayer? If so, is not the reason that we are too prone to speak of our religion as virile and manly, and think of it as puerile and ineffective when we come to test it? He came to think of his religion as the source of all that was vigorous and real; and the early morning of each day found him alone in his study, Bible before him, that he might draw strength for the day from that boundless store which only reading of the Scriptures and prayer can open."

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