Introducing the American Spirit

ctor and the

the next steamer. My neck aches from looking at the sky-scrapers, my nerves are all on edge, and," glancing a

h thus far I had been able to give them. Lake Mohonk, the only place outside of New York City which we had visited, is unique in many ways and its experiences were not likely to be dupli

ore difficult to interpret. This, not only because they have no counterpart anywhere in Europe, and the line between our university and college is so indisti

e university tucked away in a village, another defying the grime and noise of a growing city which crowded upon it; one still retaining its air of exclusive dignity in spite of its garish surro

e could not understand, however, why, when the ladies were permitted to go everywhere, and were even allowed to gaze at American students in athletic undress, they were barred from sharing with us the rare privilege of seeing a thousand or more of them being fe

impress upon visitors, and one of them is the past, in which every college glorie

hem were respectably old, one of them being contemporaneous with the history of our cou

on many places by that ubiquitous and much beloved "Father of our Country." At present the most important thing seems to be

ugh everything else, lingered fondly there, showing us in detail the expensive apparatus. With classic pride he stood upon the athletic field,

He marvelled that we had chosen to imitate English college architecture, with its heaviness and gloom, its hideous gargoyles, its useless, and here meaningless, cloisters, rather tha

are English, I vastly prefer, let us say Nassau Hall at Princeton, to anything which that glorious campus

g chosen each other by some mysterious, selective process, and I was tempted to think that it was their negative rather than their positive qualities which drew them together. We were shown the house from cellar to garret, much to the dismay of the Herr Director who does not

and the most conspicuous piece of furniture was a smoking set with a big brass tobacco bowl in the center; while innumerable pipes hung from a

ns, and the freer but responsible life in his university. He described the rooms of the present Emperor of Germany when he was a student at the University of Bonn, rema

ank, so clean looking, and what above all amazed them most, so altruistic in their outlook upon life; they looked so healthy and well gro

s of the faculty. When walking with the president of one of these universities, we met groups of students who did not salute the head of their institution and barely made way for him to pass, he grew quite wrathy, and it took the combined efforts of the president and myself to keep him from telling the young men what boors

y, Prof, where is Prexy?" he did not laugh as I expected; but when I remembered t

e his academic degrees pronounced every time a student speaks to him; but there still remains the fact that the ordinary America

discover if the preacher can make himself heard above their coughs, which is their way of challenging his m

nation. How much education can do to instill this common and deplorable lack of reverence for pers

d the battle flames; he saw ten thousands of young men suffering the war fever, and an equal number of young women shrieking in wild delirium; he saw embankments of automobiles struggling to reach the seat of the conflict, armies of men trying to storm the ramparts, and newspap

while he was wildly and vainly calling for water, she revived, and we stayed to the finish. I wished I had not brought them, for to appreciate a football game one must be born in America, and no explanation I offered could convince

on scholarship, and all the multitudinous pros and cons, are over-shadowed by the fact that, as far as the community at large is concerned, it expects this Roman holiday, and a college or university

s your sports are of little or no value, especially if engaged in vicariously; and that teaching men to dig trenches and serve cannon, to obey implicitly a c

isfaction was greatest when their own aristocratic lineage was highest. That a man's career in our institutions of learning is not made impossible because he does manual la

arge degree, and my conscience has not always been at ease when I finished a panegyric on college democracy. In fact what I fear is its defeat just there, where it is most ne

irector recognized them at once, whether instinctively or because he had discovered the type, I do not know. I knew t

inished their semester "exams," and one of them said that the question upon which he flunked was a comparison between the two English authors, Dickens and DeQuincy. Though he did

ing the social life of his university and more especially the fraternities, with particular emphasis upon his own, which excluded not only certain well

d he gave it to me with

, Slavic way, all gutturals and consonants. I also told him its meaning: "A very common hoe such as the peasants use, and it means that your ance

m. That the very fact that he and his people had come out of the steerage, and by virtue of our democratic institutions could rise to the point where they could send him to college, should ma

social boundaries. After all, the chief glory of our educational institutions is that their best things are still democratic. No man is kept from the Holy

f a Quaker college told us that just as he found there was some danger that the men who had to work their way through, were losing caste, one of the upper classmen opened a

ave their leisure hours to that most difficult and worthy task of Americanizing the immigrants who, in many instances, almost encroached upon the campus. The students visited them in the box-cars where they lived, or in

e immigrants had, I know how immeasurably much it means to these strangers to have leaning up

is so precious an asset that to lose it would m

ything. He seemed in an especially happy mood when we were talking it over in the home of one of the presidents, whose guests we had become. "Yes, I like your colleges very much, and if I should want my boy to hav