Chapter IV (1)

But from another point of view there was an element of power in the older religion which seems at first blush to be utterly lacking in the type of new religion we are describing. A prominent world-evangelist of the Young Men’s Christian Association was recently lecturing to the college students of New York City on the ethical and religious life. It was significant to note that most of his talk to students concerned itself with temptations and that the invariable outcome of each talk was that the one infallible means of meeting temptation was to realize God’s presence in one’s life, to companion with God, to feel him near and watchful, ever sympathetic, ever ready with divine help. Students do indeed get power from that kind of belief. They feel themselves before an all-seeing eye, a hand is on their shoulder, a voice is in their ear; and when the difficult moment comes they are not alone. How utterly uncompanioned, how lonely, on the other hand, must be the student who knows no beneficent, all-seeing, and all-caring Father. When his difficult moment comes he stands in desolate isolation. Victory or defeat then must hang upon his own puny strength and wavering determination. It is a favorite argument with Roman Catholics that the belief in God is the one surest guard against the sexual irregularity of young men. Remove God, the one strong bulwark, from their lives, and the flood of their passions will sweep them to their destruction.

Such considerations as these must indeed give one pause; yet I feel assured that they need not hold us long. How does a man get strength for right living? He begins—in his childhood as in the childhood of the race—by getting it through fear. The child is told, upon pain of punishment, not to do certain things. There will come a time when it will know why it ought not to do these things; but in its first months and, in a degree, through its early years, it refrains from doing them simply by reason of the pressure of the superior power of its parents. Later it refrains through unconscious imitation and affection. It lives in the light and love of its parents; and it consciously and unconsciously shapes its life after the pattern of their lives. When difficulties press, the child flees to the mother or the father for comfort and advice. Those are delicious days, of warm trust and joy and loving security. The child nestles up against the stronger power of those it loves. But the child grows to manhood and womanhood. Whence then does it get its strength for right living? The fear of the infant days, the imitation and affection of childhood and youth are now transformed into a new attitude,—an understanding of the reason in the right and the unreason in the wrong. There are many factors and influences that now take the place of parent power and affection: the love and admiration of one’s group, the customs of one’s people, the stimulus of great persons. But the essential power now is the power of _insight_—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely through the dangerous ways. But the boy is only on the way to moral and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature.

The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the truth and the truth has made them free.

I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening, half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father. That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it. Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a miracle-working Deity.

“When half-gods go,” says Emerson, “the gods arrive.” When once we give up this easy way of moral and religious hypnosis; when once we believe that God, the watchful policeman of the universe, no longer exists, we shall solemnly and seriously take up the task we have so long cast upon a deity’s shoulders—_our_ task of shaping and directing and making strong the moral possibilities of the children we bring into the world. From the old consolation, in short, of divine protection, we shall awake to a new loyalty to our fundamental moral obligations.

It is significant in this connection to note that the farther we go back in the history of religion, the more the moral reference of situations is secondary and the supernatural reference primary. The ten commandments, for example, were first of all a divine behest, and only secondarily a series of laws founded on the essential requirements of human well-being. But as we come nearer to our own day, the moral quality of situations tends more and more to usurp the primacy of the old supernatural reference. The limit of such evolution is the disappearance altogether of the supernatural, the evaluation, ultimately, of all situations and activities in terms of their inherent good or bad for the life of humanity and the world.

* * * * *

The old loyalty, in short, was the loyalty of loving children; the new loyalty is the loyalty of strong-charactered men and women. Has the time come for moral and spiritual maturity? To some of us there is no longer an alternative. “When I was a child I spake as a child; I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In the light of spiritual maturity, the god of magic, the god of miraculous power, the god of loving protection, the god of all-seeing care—the Parent God—must give way to the God that is the very inner ideal life of ourselves, our own deep and abiding possibilities of being; the God _in us_ that stimulates us to what is highest in value and power.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

_August 18, 1914_

MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:

I suppose that every thoughtful man in America has asked himself during the last troubled weeks what influence the European war may exert upon the United States; and I take the liberty of addressing a few words to you in order to point out that it is entirely within our own choice what its effects upon us will be, and to urge very earnestly upon you the sort of speech and conduct which will best safeguard the nation against distress and disaster.

The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.

The spirit of the nation in this critical matter will be determined largely by what individuals and society and those gathered in public meetings do and say; upon what newspapers and magazines contain; upon what our ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions on the streets.

The people of the United States are drawn from many nations and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.

It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility; responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United States, whose love of their country, and whose loyalty to its government should unite them as Americans, all bound in honor and affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided into camps of hostile opinions, hot against each other, involved in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.

Such diversions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend.

I venture, therefore, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides.

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another. My thought is of America. I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every thoughtful American that this great country of ours, which is, of course, the first in our thoughts and in our hearts, should show herself in this time of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels, and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.

Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the restraint which will bring to our people the happiness and the great lasting influence for peace we covet for them?

WOODROW WILSON

ATAVISM

KARL REMER

The city had withstood its besiegers for a long time. The guns on the mountain had poured down shot, the guns on the north and on the south had battered the old walls. The walls had crumbled and fallen. The walls were old and they had been considered picturesque for so long that it was as if they had forgotten the sturdy virtues of their youth.

Through the breaches came the soldiers. Tribesmen they seemed of the old days of the Grand Khan.

The soldiers were thinking. They were not accustomed to thought. Was it true, ran their thoughts, that their leader had promised that there would be no looting? He had promised, this they knew, that there would be no looting after he entered the city. What was the meaning of that “he”? Did it mean the army or did it mean the general? Did it mean the soldiers? There was the rumor that the general could not leave his present quarters for three days. Rain, or snow, or ice, or drought prevented. What was the meaning of that? Did it mean three days of fine, bloody looting?

The soldiers entered the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they poured in. Through one gate, through two gates, through three gates they came. It was a sullen business and silently did they press forward. They had not made up their minds about those three days. They were not sure about the general. Perhaps he was playing one of his grim jokes. Was he, perhaps, already within the city? He had promised before many that there would be no looting. The foreigner, the Jesus-religion man in black clothes, had stood beside him. It was hard to tell, where foreigners were concerned, how much to believe. Foreigners were an unusual sort of people. Most of them did not look dangerous, but any one of them might have power. It was one of the inexplicable things about foreigners that one could never tell the amount of power a foreigner had by the amount he used. To have power and not use it, to have rice and not eat it—strange men these foreigners.

The soldiers poured into the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they came; but not like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan. The loot and the fun were before them, yet they restrained themselves.

The soldiers were yellow and clad in yellow, and they poured through the gates as the yellow Yangtsze pours between its banks. Silver and silks were before them, but the hand was withheld from the knife and a sullen silence was around them.

Some one began it. There came a curse and an answer, a taunt and a gunshot. So it began.

Here was a shop boarded, bolted, and locked. A crowd of soldiers gathered before it. They demanded that the shop be opened. No reply came from within. The demand was repeated and emphasized with a blow of a rifle butt against the boards. Still there was no reply. More gun butts fell upon the boards and they began to creak and snap. A scared man within began to dicker for life, property, and family. He paid and paid high—for nothing. The shop was broken open. Stripped and wounded, the man was sent down the street. His goods became the playthings of the soldiers. His wife lay above, outraged and stabbed. His daughter was in the hands of other tormentors. At the command of the soldiers, his son began carrying his father’s goods and piling them as the soldiers directed. There was a look of death upon the boy’s face; he was sick and weary. The soldiers demanded more silver. The boy knew there was no more. He knew that his father had paid it all to save the family. He was so sadly sure he would not look. The soldiers cut him down and went their way.

There was a ricksha coolie who had sunk frightened against a wall in a side street. He had hidden his family, but he, himself, had come forth from hiding in the hope of much work and large pay. With quaking knees he had pulled loads of loot for the soldiers. At last the horror had overcome him and here he cowered against a wall. He was called but he could not move. He knew that he could not pass down the bloody streets again. The call was repeated and still he did not move. They shot him as he lay and took his ricksha from him. That street also, a little street and a quiet one, had its spreading mark of red.

A poor barber lay trembling upon his bamboo bed. He had no family and few friends. Why had he not run away? He lay thinking and thinking but he could think of no good reason. As he lay thus they came upon his shop. Down came the boards. He paid them all his savings, a pitifully small sum, and they demanded his wife and children. They killed him because he had neither the one nor the other. “For,” said they, “no honest man is without a family.”

There was a girl of eighteen whom the soldiers seized. Guile or temporary insanity prompted her to play her part as if with pleasure. She smiled on them and shrugged her shoulders most coquettishly. She bandied jokes with them and made advances. A petty officer accepted her advances and, later, had her beaten to death. The soldiers approved. “These people must be taught,” said they, “that modesty is a woman’s duty.”

For two days the riot continued. For two nights there was no sleep but the sleep of death. The moans of the women, the groans of the men, fire and fresh alarms made sleep a thing that seemed years away. The city was red and the blood flowed. Loot and the lives of men, silver and the bodies of women, these things did the victors take as is old custom in China. Then came the third day and the general.

The foreigner in black clothes, the man of the religion of Jesus, had lived through these two days and two nights. “One can never tell,” said the soldiers, “what power these foreigners have.” “That is the foreigner’s house,” said the soldiers, “let it alone.”

The foreigner had lived through the two days and the two nights, but he had not slept. He had been thinking of the promise of the general. “There will be no looting after I enter the city”—these were the general’s words and the man who had spoken them had not yet entered. As a joke the speech was not bad, but too much blood and no sleep spoils the taste for jokes.

The general entered with an important noise of trumpets. Where he rode the looting stopped. He seemed weary, however, and did not ride far. The smoke of the many fires may have hurt his eyes. The day may have been too hot. In any case the general seemed discreetly weary and discreetly blind.

The man of the religion of Jesus came to the general. His words were to the point. “Is this the way you keep promises?” he asked.

The general did not like directness and he did not care to argue. “There is no looting,” he said, and with a smile he pointed down the street.

“There is looting everywhere except before your eyes.”

“There is none,” said the general. It was characteristic of him to add, “What there is must be stopped.”

“By whom?” asked the foreigner.

“Take one hundred men,” said the general, “go up and down in the city. If you see looting or outrage, cut off the guilty man’s head. As for myself, I have seen none.”

The foreigner hesitated, but thoughts came to him of the last two days. If he did nothing, who would act? Opportunity seemed to him duty. So in despair and rage he agreed and at the head of his hundred he set out.

They came suddenly to a corner where a soldier was searching a dead man’s clothes. Here was guilt so plain no proof was needed. The man was quickly sentenced and in another moment his head was off. “Justice,” said the foreigner to himself, “must upon occasion be swift.”

They came upon a house where a widow and her young daughter lived. The house was small and until now it had been overlooked. A noise of scuffling caused the foreigner to look within. The younger woman lay bruised and naked upon the floor, the mother was still struggling with her assailant. Two heads fell and the foreigner smiled. “Payment,” said he to himself, “is a thing dear to the Lord. Here two have paid.”

The hundred and their leader came upon a half-crazed soldier who was trying to run up a narrow street with two mattresses which he had stolen. The mattresses brushed the sides of the buildings upon the narrow street so that, as the man’s load struck gate or door-post upon the one side or the other, the man reeled as a drunken man does. They caught him and made him kneel upon those very mattresses. The hundred went on and the man’s head was left resting softly upon the stolen goods. The mattresses were becoming red. “The blood of justice is red also,” said the foreigner.

Thus did the man of the religion of Jesus and his hundred make progress through this city of great suffering.

They seized a soldier carrying a woman. She was groaning. He protested that he was carrying her to shelter. The man had earrings and a chain in his belt. The woman’s ears were bleeding. The good knife descended and again punishment found guilt.

They went on and as they went there came a great joy into the heart of the foreigner. “These people,” said he to himself, “are children and they need a lesson. By God’s help they shall have it. Many lessons are hard but many must be learned.”

They seized an old soldier who was picking up the trinkets that had been dropped before a jewelry shop. He swore that he had robbed no man, but the man in black decided against him and off came his head.

As the hundred passed on they sent fear before them and left a trail of red justice behind them. The joy burned brighter in the heart of the man in black. “Have I not talked to these people of the justice of God?” said he to himself. “Now they are seeing it. Now they will know it to be swift and terrible. A knife with a keen blade, a judge with a clean heart, these things this people needs.”

They came upon two soldiers who were quarrelling over the division of a sable coat. Each had an end and the altercation was proceeding over the outstretched garment. They protested that they had bought the coat not two hours before and that they had paid for it. One begged piteously for his life, but the man in black shook his head.

So the expedition of the hundred became a thing of blood and more blood. The heart of the man of the religion of Jesus was filled with a grim ecstasy. It seemed to dance within him. “Am I not,” he chanted to himself, “a messenger of the Lord to a sinful people? With what measure they have measured, have I measured unto them. As they have pitied others, so have I pitied them. Blood must flow, for blood alone can cleanse. Blood alone can cleanse.”

A young soldier was caught as he climbed the stairs of a small house. He was brought into the street and told to kneel. “I have heard of your Jesus and his forgiveness,” he said; “now I know.” He knelt with a sort of dignity, the dignity that death brings to the brave, and his head fell.

His words struck through the blood fever to the heart of the man in black. For a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them again he saw with his old clearness. He knew that blood is blood and shame came over him.

He sent back his hundred, saying: “Go. I have done wrong.”

He came to his own house and to his own small room where a crucifix hung above the bed. He knelt and remained for a long time with his eyes fixed upon the figure. The words, “Father, forgive them,” came from his lips as from the lips of a stranger. For two days and for two nights he had not slept. He sank slowly to the floor and lay still before the quiet figure on the cross.

THE CHANGING TEMPER AT HARVARD

GILBERT V. SELDES

This article is not intended in any sense as a reply to the _Confessions of a Harvard Man_ published several months ago in THE FORUM by Mr. Harold E. Stearns. The importance of those articles, as Mr. Stearns had reason to point out, lay not so much in what they told about Harvard as in what they told about him. Precisely. Analyses of the temper of Young America have their place. The temper of Harvard itself, however, is something quite apart, and it is to that alone that this article is devoted. The importance of it lies only in the number of significant and true things it tells about Harvard.

And that, perhaps, is importance enough. I say this in none of that college spirit which makes a man believe that his college, because it is his, is singled out for the peculiar attentions of the high gods who brood over academic welfare. A change, such as I am describing, if it took place at any other college, would be quite as important. The fact is that it could have taken place nowhere else.

Which brings us to the old Harvard and the popular misconceptions of its character. It was supposed to create a type of man, effeminate, detached, affecting superiority, incapable, and snobbish. Certainly men of this order did graduate from Harvard, but the great truth is that there was no Harvard type; there were always Harvard men, but there was never a “Harvard man.” The importance of this distinction is inestimable, because it points to the fundamental thing in the older Harvard life: its insistence upon individuality. In that the old Harvard struck deep through superficial things and came at once upon the fundamental thing identical in democracy and in aristocracy. It bestowed each man in accordance with his deserts and, following Hamlet’s dictum, according to its own nobility; and gave him according to his needs and according to his powers. Like every truly democratic institution, Harvard was aristocratic; like every truly aristocratic institution, Harvard was democratic. At the very moment when it was supposed to be breeding aristocratic snobs, Harvard was fulfilling the great mission of _democratic_ institutions in encouraging each man to be himself as greatly and completely as he could. At the very moment when it was supposed to exercise a mean and narrowing influence over its students, it was fulfilling the great mission of _cultural_ institutions in helping each man to a ripening of his powers, to enlargement of his interests, and to widening of his sympathies. Its effeminates went to war against dirt and danger and disease; its snobs devoted themselves to the advancement of social justice; its detached men became bankers and mill-owners and journalists; one of its weaklings conquered the world. The great thing was that in all of them the old impulse to a deep and full life remained; the tradition of culture was beginning to prosper. So that Harvard could send out a statesman who was interested in the Celtic revival, a littérateur with a fondness for baseball, a financier who appreciated art and a philosopher who appreciated life. At the same time it graduated thousands of men who took with them into professional life and into business life a feeling, perhaps only a memory, of the variety and excellence of human achievement—men who without pride or shame, which are equally snobbish, tried to substitute discipline and cultivation for disorder and barbarity. It is no petty accomplishment.

To achieve it Harvard had to stand with bitter determination against the current sweeping toward the practical, the immediate, the successful. At the same time it bought its cherished democracy of thought at the price of social anarchy. The college as a body made very little effort to protect or to comfort its individuals. It was assumed that he who came could make his own way; if the way were hard, so much the better! The triumph would be sweeter. The great fraternities grew in strength, possibly because there was no countervailing force issuing from the college itself. But there was never a determined organized attempt to make the individual life of the undergraduate happy or comfortable. In its place there was a huge, inchoate, and tremendously successful attempt to make the intellectual life of the individual interesting and productive. Each man found his own; fought to win his place, struggled against loneliness and despair, and emerged sturdier in spirit, younger and braver and better. Some fell. They were the waste products of a civilization which was harsh, selfish in its interests, generous in its appreciations, a microcosm of life. A pity that some should have to fall! But it would be a greater pity if for them the battle should cease. Because the fighting was always fair. The strength which developed in many a man in his efforts to make a paper, or a club, or even in qualifying to join some little group of men, was often the basis of a successful life. With it came an intensification of personality; the absence of a set type made the suppression of the individual at Harvard almost impossible. I am certain that no one with a personality worth preserving ever lost it there.

I wonder whether those who speak and write about democracy at our colleges ever realize the importance of this intellectual freedom. Mr. Owen Johnson is not unconscious of it, yet his whole attack upon the colleges, practically unchallenged, was on account of their lack of social democracy. It is considered a dreadful thing among us that rich A should not want to talk to poor B; but it would never occur to us to be shocked if they had nothing to say to each other except small talk about baseball or shop talk about courses. And if the choice is between social promiscuity and intellectual freedom, we must say, “Let their ways be apart eternally, so long as they are free.”

The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an undergraduate wrote in _The Yale Literary Magazine_ that “we are accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we are educated.” For Princeton _The Nassau Lit_ writes this significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work, until the habit of _conforming_ has become a strongly ingrained second nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas…. We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather bourgeois conventionality.”

Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements, I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual freedom—in spite of all!

I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said, and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon “facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at Harvard.

They are of two orders, social and intellectual. In the first group we have the senior and freshmen dormitories; a new insistence upon class lines; a new emphasis upon college spirit and with it a disquieting resurgence of that great abomination, “college life”; a change of attitude toward our much maligned “Harvard indifference” and “Harvard snobbery.” In the second class come the group system as opposed to the free elective system, the failure of cultural activities, the contempt for dilettantism, the emergence of the scholar. The last phenomenon is mentioned out of no overbearing desire to be either thorough or fair; it has a significance of its own.

Superficially the most striking of these changes is the extraordinary importance attached to class lines. It will be remembered that when President Wilson tried to reform Princeton with the Oxford system as a model, he was balked by precisely this feeling of class unity. At Harvard the thing was not unknown; but it was not important. Princeton men rejoice that their freshmen are compelled to wear caps, black shirts and corduroy trousers for the first three months of the year, so that no snobbery may develop! To the healthy Harvard man this seems sheer insanity—democracy run to seed. Such solicitude for promiscuity seems to intend a horrible mistrust of something, and certainly a beautiful misapprehension of what democracy means. I am speaking not from mere personal experience, but from that of generations of Harvard men, when I say that it has been possible for a man to go through his four years without knowing more than ten men in his own class intimately, yet acquiring all that college could give by knowing the finest spirits in a whole college cycle. The new order will change all this. It will not forbid a man to seek his acquaintances outside his class; but it will suggest and presently it may insist that his duty to his class can only be fulfilled by cultivating the acquaintance of all who entered college on the same day as he. We may live to see the time when Harvard will emulate the Yale man’s boast that he knew all his classmates (but one) by their first names!

The outward forms of this change are the senior and freshmen dormitories. The former resulted from the great schism of 1909 when the Gold Coast was defeated in the vote for class officers by the poorer men living in and about the Yard. It was considered intolerable that a class should be so divided and a decided effort was made to get the rich society men to live in the Yard, beside their poorer fellow-students, during their senior year. This has been a great success! A group of men, friends for three years, bound by steady companionship and natural affinities, occupy one entry of Hollis. Another group, equally bound by totally different sympathies and activities, occupy another. They nod to each other as they come from class. If a man in one group is taking the same course in Engineering as a man in the other, they may discuss a problem or denounce a “stiff” hour exam. in common. There their ways part. It seems inconceivable that the heads of a great college should have been able to believe that the mere accident of adjacent rooms could actually be the basis, or even the beginnings, of a true democratic spirit of fraternity. And—let me anticipate—_if the college had not ignominiously failed in its effort to supply a true basis of fraternity, it would not now be driven to a method so childish and so artificial as that of class grouping_.

But if the senior dormitories are merely silly, what can be said of the plan to house all the freshmen together in a group of buildings far removed from the centre of college activities? It is not here a question of whether they “will work,” but of the spirit which prompted their foundation. They will not be as bad as their opponents may imagine, because nothing will break down the tradition of free intercourse, and the man who writes or the man who jumps will inevitably seek out his own. But it is certainly a weakening of Harvard’s moral fibre that an effort should be made to “help along” the freshmen, instead of compelling them to fight their own way. That the change really drives into the spirit of Harvard can be judged by these significant instances of the attitude taken toward the new scheme by graduates, undergraduates, and by the college authorities. First consider the testimony of an alumni organization secretary. In a conversation he said, “We have found it the hardest thing in the world to persuade graduates that Harvard needs freshmen dormitories. They are perfectly willing to subscribe for dorms, but they balk at the freshmen restriction.” Among the undergraduates there exists a peculiar feeling of relief that they came to Harvard before the buildings were up. Even those who defend them and say that they “will be a good thing for the freshies,” do not regret that the “good thing” was not for them. Articles have been written in undergraduate publications defending them, but I do not know a single man in the present (1914) senior class who passionately regrets that they were not built four years ago. And finally from the college itself came distinct and explicit denial that there is any intention of tucking the freshmen into bed at nine o’clock each night. _Hein!_

And the result: a wonderful renaissance of the demand for “college spirit.” College spirit is, of course, nothing in the world but undergraduate jingoism. The desire to cheer his team is one which no man can afford to miss, but it points to an undeniable falling off in democracy when the “rah-rah” spirit can dominate a college and call those who will not yield to it unfaithful and unworthy. Under that tyranny Harvard is already beginning to suffer. Further, men are beginning to be urged to do things not because they want to do them, but for Harvard’s sake. They are urged to back their teams for the sake of the college and its reputation. It will seem incredible, but there actually appeared in the columns of an undergraduate publication an ominous exhortation “not to be behind Yale” in showing our spirit.

Disagreeable as these things are, they are inconsidered trifles beside the change of attitude which has taken place in regard to the serious work of the college. I cling, in spite of successive disillusions, to the belief that _the function of the college is to create a tradition of culture_: it is not to create gentlemen or scholars unless it can effect the combination of both, and it is certainly not to prepare men for success _in business_. Success in life is a different matter. College should not spoil a man for life; it should enable him to appreciate life, make him “able and active in distinguishing the great from the petty.” That is what culture means; and that is precisely what Harvard has decided not to do. Emphasis there has borrowed from emphasis everywhere. The advantage of President Lowell’s system of course grouping is that the undergraduate is no longer able to take 17 uncorrelated courses and achieve a degree; he must know a good deal about one thing at least. But aside from the obvious fact that a great many freshmen are incapable of choosing their life work and choose what is easiest for them, the group system has a terrible defect. It has come about that men choose their group from worthy or unworthy reasons and consider that they have acquired all the good of a college career if they have done creditable work in that particular group. The other courses are merely “fillers.” The majority of men are content to concentrate, to narrow their interests, and the whole meaning of college, which is to prepare the way for future enlargement of sympathies, has been lost. Figures cannot be cited for or against this assertion. But some tendencies now discernible at Harvard may be illuminating.

First, the scholar has emerged. He has become respectable; he has also become a specialist, Economics, Government and the practical sciences being the favored groups. Second, there has grown up a great and loud contempt for the dilettante and æsthete. I hope these words will not be misunderstood. The dilettante at Harvard is any man who writes, thinks, talks well, is not particularly athletic and does not go to the moving-picture shows which have become the chief attraction at the Harvard Union. (This last, by the way, is not fantasy but fact; the “movie” has proved the great agent for class solidarity at Harvard). An æsthete at Harvard is one who has any diversity of interests and activities. At Harvard it is almost a crime to be interested in art, anarchism, literature, music, pageantry, dancing, acting; to write poetry or fiction, to talk English, to read French (except de Maupassant) for pleasure. Mr. Eric Dawson, whose article in _The Yale Lit_ I have already quoted, advises the Yale man to keep it darkly secret “if he cares for etchings, prefers Beethoven to Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and Meredith to Meredith Nicholson.” It is a terrible commentary on Harvard’s intellectual life that the words should be applicable now.

They are. Within the past three years the degeneration of every cultural activity has been persistently rapid. _The Lampoon_ alone resists, and it is marked by its satire on all the new movements. The Socialist Club was founded in 1909. Its boast that it included the active intelligence of the college was always a gross exaggeration, but it was in itself active and intelligent. This year it is practically dead; free, incisive thinking has gone out of fashion. The Dramatic Club started at about the same time with high ideals and even higher achievement. Its record for the past two years has been one of protracted failure. (There is some excuse; other organizations have taken some of its most talented actors.) The activity is too “detached” for Harvard men of the brave new stripe. Even more disastrous has been the career of _The Harvard Monthly_—_The Atlantic Monthly_ of the colleges—which was founded about thirty years ago and has had on its boards such men as George Santayana, Professor George P. Baker, Robert Herrick, Norman Hapgood, and a host of other distinguished men. It always lacked popular appeal, but there were always enough men at Harvard to produce a superior magazine and almost enough readers to make the production worth while. Within the last few years it has been found almost impossible to keep the _Monthly_ going, and its dissolution is imminent. It may combine with _The Advocate_, another paper of other ideals, once graced with infinite wit, now failing because that too is out of fashion. It is possible that these activities may revive, that succeeding generations will take up the slack. That is the work of individuals. The creation of a receptive body is the work of the college, and that has been forgotten.

And if you ask what the Harvard man is doing, what he is talking about, while these activities are being ruined before his eyes, the answer is not merely as Mr. Stearns gave it, that the Harvard man talks smut. So do most other men. The terrible thing is that the Harvard man talks very little else that is worth listening to. Lectures, cuts, assignments, exams, and shows; baseball, daily news (a mere “Did you see that?” conversation), steam engines; girls, parties, class elections, piffling nonsense—that is the roster of the college man. I am terribly conscious of the intolerable stupidity of “intellectual” conversation; I do not wish that conversation at college should consist of nothing but considerations of the Fourfold Root. But it does seem rather unfortunate that the men who are, theoretically, to be the leaders of the next generation, should never talk or think about art, should have _no_ interest in ideas, should be ignorant of philosophy and impatient of fine thinking, should use their own tongue as a barbarous instrument, should be loud and vulgar of speech, commonplace in manner, entirely lacking in distinction of spirit and mind.

The college has failed to make intelligent activity the basis of democracy; there is no community of interest in things of the mind or spirit and that is why artificial means, with the peril they bring to the individual, are resorted to. How far President Lowell is responsible for that which has happened in his administration is a question I cannot answer. He has seen the signs of his time; he has warned Harvard of the terrible danger which has come to it with the decadence of individual study and independent reading. He is trying to make intellectual activity the basis of Harvard’s democracy at the very moment when he is the ablest of those who in reality help to sustain all that I have here ventured to criticise.

It has been in no reactionary spirit. I have not intended to say that Harvard actually produces the type I have described. The truth is that it does so little to refine what it gets. The care of the superior individual, which always results in the greatest benefit to all, has ceased to engross the college. The new order will not be of the same heterogeneous excellence. That change all suffer, and all resent. Granted that the new Harvard will be glorious and great, was there not room, besides all the State colleges and the technical schools, for its intransigeant detachment, its hopeless struggle for a “useless” culture? It will be said that for such a training men should go to smaller colleges, like Amherst, where they will receive the special attention they may deserve. But I think of what William James said once of Harvard, and I wonder what Harvard men, and what the country, will do when they realize that it can never be said again:

“The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons…. As a nursery for independent and lonely thinkers … Harvard still is in the van…. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product!”

THE NEW STEERAGE

FRANCIS BYRNE HACKETT

Eleven hundred of us, perhaps twelve hundred, were booked steerage from Liverpool to New York. We had been brought to the dock at noon, away from our friends, though we heard the vessel was not to leave till five. On the other side of a stone pier rose the huge _Lusitania_ with her four funnels. Everyone on our tender moved expectantly forward. There was an official cry: “Britishers first!” The chosen of the Lord! But the horde of ignorant foreigners came surging ahead. Miscellaneously we crowded up the gangway. Another gangway sloped for us on to the _Lusitania_. Several British policemen and stewards faced us to keep us in line. At so many guardian angels we began to feel depressed.

Medical inspection. The instant we put foot on the deck of the _Lusitania_, this was our first business.

“Have your Inspection Tickets ready.” Before we could inquire what was going to happen, it was happening. We were passed in a slow trickle between two officials. “Take off your hat.” “Take off your glasses.” I stood blinking while the doctor deftly plucked up my eyelids. He waved me ahead, my ungranulated eyelids made harsh by the handling. Hundreds were before us on the deck, and those from behind began to press on our heels with the inevitable “myself first” impulse of human beings. We were a medley of races, Swedes, Greek, English and Welsh, Irish, Russian Jews, Poles, mute Lithuanian peasants, and men from a Northern race who turned out to be Finns. It was almost as cosmopolitan as the Third Avenue Elevated. We advanced with repeated hesitations and conscious slowness. A woman turned white in the crush and had to be helped to a seat near an open porthole. In front of me, a 12-year-old boy, dead beat, leaned against his big brother—and under his arm, if you please, wearily hugged a camp stool. “Why doesn’t he sit on the stool?” The mother, a thin, strained, admirable creature, whose face showed the fine wrinkles of a life too intent, allowed me to open the stool for him. From his low seat he rewarded me more than once with a look of confidence and smiling good-nature. They had travelled by rail all night, the mother volunteered, from a town in Wales. They were on their way at last to join the father in California. “I have two more in California”—the mother pointed to her children, who cheerfully smiled.

Women and children. During that weary wait I observed them here and there, standing submissively for three-quarters of an hour. At length, after the long halt, the tension was relieved, and we moved again, this time past another doctor. “Take off your hat.” The doctor had apparently to inspect the unnaturalized polls on which that morning we had paid a four dollar tax. He was a man of great perception, the doctor, and the actual examination was an affair of split seconds. On completing the circuit of the deck our yellow Inspection Tickets (given to us at the office in the morning when we had paid our $37.50 for the passage) received their first stamp. The Cunard Line accepted us as healthy live stock.

My Inspection Ticket said Room H 22, and a steward took me there. There were seven other occupants. Most of them were taking their ease in their berths and smoking. They were all English or American. I responded to their cheery hello, but their carbonic gas was strong, and the portholes proved to be immovable. I sat down on a lower berth, bumped my head against the top one, and had hardly room for my knees in the aisle. My carbonic gas did not improve the air. I felt discouraged, and went out. Nearby I saw a most capacious 4-berth room, and there was a vacancy in it. Henri Bergson says that “life proceeds by insinuation.” I felt less gloomy. I found the bedroom steward and asked him whether I could be changed. He was amicable but not quite concrete, a bit of a Jesuit. About this time word flashed by that we were back at the Landing Stage for the cabin passengers: deferring the affairs of moment, I went on deck.

We all pushed aft for a good view, only to find a rope stretched across the deck, and a grim sailor guarding it. “That’s all the scope you get.” We flattened back against one another. And they let down a beautiful canopied gangway for the upper classes.

Braided officers stood in a row to receive, on a nice clear deck. All the stewards were lined up in fresh white coats. Against the sky line we studied the new angles of hat plumes. On they stepped with leisured gait, with an air of distinguished fatigue. “The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks, walking and mincing as they go.” Indifferently they handed their light burdens to the now demure stewards. I looked around at my comrades back of the rope. A child in arms next to me chortled as he bandaged his mother’s eyes. She gently removed the bandage, only to be blinded again. Behind me, a buxom Swede looked open-eyed at her feathered sisters abaft. Everywhere the interest was intense and simple. I turned again to envisage the daughters of Zion. As in another world they moved—a world where policemen are unnecessary, where stewards are spring-heeled, where officers stand in line, where eyelids are not officially scrutinized nor polls inspected, where the gangway has a canopy and weariness is consoled. I admired “the bravery of their anklets, and the cauls and the crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets and the mufflers.” Must it not be delightful, said I to myself, to merit so much attention from everyone, and to be so prettily arrayed? Must it not be pleasant to have eyelids so immune, and to have a quite uninspected poll?