CHAPTER XII

COLLEGES AND STUDENTS

The municipal elections in New York which resulted in the defeat of Tammany were fought out with great vigor in all the usual ways. There were speeches, bands and flags. The newspapers were full of the sayings of the different candidates, and the leader writers of each party seemed to be highly successful in cornering the speakers of the other party. It was shown clearly every day that orators shamelessly contradicted themselves, went back on their own principles, and must, if they had any respect for logic or decency, either retract their latest remarks or explain them. All this was very interesting to us. It would have been interesting to any one. It was particularly interesting to us because it was almost new to us. Elections are, I suppose, fought in more or less the same way everywhere; but in Connaught we hardly ever have elections. An independent candidate bubbles up occasionally, but as a rule we are content to return to Parliament the proper man, that is to say the man whom somebody, we never quite know who, says we ought to return.

I gathered the impression that elections must be an exciting sport for those engaged in them. I do not think that the "pomp and circumstance" of the business, the outward manifestations of activity, can make much difference to the result. Speeches, for instance, are certainly thrilling things to make, and I can understand how it is that orators welcome elections as heaven sent opportunities for the exercise of their art. But the people who listen to the speeches always seem to have their minds made up beforehand whether they agree with the speaker or not. They know what he is going to say and are prepared with hoots or cheers. I never heard of any one who came to hoot remaining to cheer. I doubt whether there is a single modern instance of a speech having affected the destiny of a vote. A very good speech might indeed produce some effect if it were not that there is always an equally good speech made at the same time on the other side. Election speeches are like tug boats pulling different ways at the opposite ends of a large ship. They neutralize each other and the ship drifts gently, sideways, with the tide.

It cannot be seriously maintained that bands or flags help voters to make up their minds. In nine cases out of ten it is impossible to tell for which side a band is playing, and therefore unlikely that it will draw voters to one side rather than the other. In the tenth case, when the band, by selecting some particular tune, makes its meaning clear, the music is not of a quality which moves the listener to any feeling of gratitude to the candidate who pays for it. I should, I think, feel bound to vote for a man who gave me "_panem et circenses_," but I should expect good bread and an attractive circus. I should not dream of voting for a candidate who provided me with inferior music. The flags are a real addition to the gaiety of city life. The ordinary elector loves to see them fluttering about. But the ordinary elector is not by any means a fool. He knows that the flags will be taken down very soon after the election is over. If any candidate promised to keep his flags flying as a permanent decoration of the city streets he might capture a few votes. But we all know that none of them will do anything as useful as that.

Nor do I think that the editors of newspapers produce much effect by showing up the inconsistencies of politicians and pinning them down to-day, when they are driven to say something quite different, to the things which, under stress of other circumstances, they said yesterday. It does not take a clever man, like a newspaper editor, to corner a politician. Any fool can do that, and the performance of an obviously easy trick does not move an audience at all. An acrobat who merely hops across the stage on one leg gets no applause and the box office returns fall away. The thing is too easy. It is the man who does something really hard, balances himself on the end of an umbrella and juggles with twenty balls at once, who attracts the public. If a newspaper editor at an election time would, instead of showing up the other side, offer proofs that the men on his own side are consistent, logical and high-principled, he would have enormous influence with the voters. "Any one," so the ordinary man would reason, "who can prove things like that about politicians must be amazingly clever. If he is amazingly clever, far cleverer than I ever hope to be, then there is a strong probability that his side is the right one. I shall vote for it." The ordinary man, so we ought to recollect, is not nearly such a fool as is generally supposed. He is quite capable of reasoning, and he would reason, I am sure, just in the way I have suggested, if he were given a chance.

The keen interest which we took in the showy side of electioneering made us diligent readers of the newspapers. We were rewarded beyond our hopes. We came across, on the very evening of the election itself, a little paragraph, tucked away in a corner, which we might very easily have missed if we had been less earnest students. In a certain district in New York, so this paragraph told us, there was a queue of voters waiting outside a polling station. Among them was a man who was known to be or was suspected of being hostile to Tammany. It was likely that he would cast his vote on the other side. There were, looking thoughtfully at the queue, certain men described by the newspaper as "gangsters" in the pay of the Tammany organization. They seized the voter whose principles seemed to them objectionable and dragged him out of the queue, plainly in order to prevent his recording his vote. So far there was nothing of very special interest in the paragraph. We knew beforehand—even in Ireland we know this—that voters are a good deal influenced by the strength of the party machine. The strength is seldom displayed in its nakedly physical form on this side of the Atlantic, but it is always there and is really the determining force in most elections. It was the thing which happened next which gave the incident its value. A university student who happened to be engaged in social work in the neighborhood saw what was done. He was one man and there were several "gangsters," but he attacked them at once. He was, as might be supposed, as he himself must surely have foreseen, worsted in the fray which followed. The gangsters, after the manner of their kind, mauled, beat and kicked him to such an extent that he had to be carried to a hospital. It did not appear that this university student was a party man, eager for the triumph of his side as the gangsters were for the victory of theirs. He seems to have acted on the simple principle that a man who has a right to vote ought not to be interfered with in the exercise of that right. He was on the side of justice and liberty. He was not concerned with politics of either kind.

I do not know what happened to that student afterwards. I searched the papers in vain for any further reference to the incident. I wanted to know whether the voter voted in the end. I wanted to know what was done to the gangsters. I wanted to know whether the student recovered from his injuries or not. I wanted, above all, to know whether anyone recognized how fine a thing that student did. I never discovered another paragraph about the incident.

I was talking some time afterwards to an English friend, the friend to whom I have already referred, who knows America very well and who offered to take care of me while I was there. I told him the story of the voter and the Tammany gangsters.

"These things," he said, "happen over here. They are constantly happening. One gets into the way of not being shocked by them. But there always is that university student somewhere round, when they do happen."

It is an amazingly high tribute to the American universities. If my friend is right, if blatant force and abominable injustice do indeed find themselves faced, always and as a matter of course, by a university student, then the universities are doing a very splendid work. And I am inclined to think that my friend is right. There is another story of the same kind, one of many which might be told. This one came to me, not in a newspaper but from the lips of a man who told me that he was a witness of what happened.

There was—I forget where—a kind of settlement, half camp, half town, built in a lonely place for the workmen of a company which was conducting some mining or engineering enterprise. The town, if I am to call it a town, was owned and ruled by the company. The workmen were of various nationalities, and, taken as a whole, a rough lot. It was, no doubt, difficult to keep them contented, difficult enough to keep them at all in such a place. It would probably be unjust to say that the company encouraged immorality; but the existence of disorderly houses in the place was winked at. The men wanted them. The officials of the company, we may suppose, found their line of least resistance in ignoring an evil which they may have felt they could not cure. After a while, during one summer vacation, there came to the place a university student. He was not a miner or an engineer and had no particular business with the company. He was, apparently, on a kind of mission; but whether he was preaching Christianity or social reform of a general kind I was not told. He was the inevitable university student of my friend's remark.

He found himself face to face with an evil thing which he at all events would not ignore. He made his protest. Now no man of the world, certainly no business man, objects to a proper protest, temperately made, provided the protester does not go too far. The man of the world is tolerant. He is a consistent believer in the policy of living and letting live. He recognizes that people with principles must be allowed to state them. It is in order to be stated that principles exist. But he holds that in common fairness he ought to be allowed to ignore these statements of principle. That was just what this university student could not understand. He went on protesting more and more forcibly until he made the officials uncomfortable and the men exceedingly angry. It was the men, either with, or, as I hope, without the knowledge of their superiors, who first threatened, then beat that university student, beat him on the head with a sandbag and finally drove him from the place with a warning that he had better not return again.

He did return, bringing with him certain officers of the law. He was a man of some strength of character and the recollection of the beating did not cause him to hesitate. Unfortunately the officers of the law could not do much. The disorderly houses were all quite orderly when they appeared. They were small shops selling apples, matches and other innocent things. There was no evidence to be got that anything worse had ever gone on in them than the sale of apples and matches. The previous inhabitants of these houses were picnicking in the woods for a few days. All that the officers of the law were able to do was to conduct the university student safely out of the place. That was difficult enough.

I am not sure that this story is true, for I did not read it in a newspaper; but it is very like several others which I heard. They may all be false or very greatly exaggerated, but they show, at least, the existence of a popular myth in which the university student figures, always with the same kind of character. Behind every myth there is some reality. Even solar myths, the vaguest myths there are, lead back ultimately to the sun, which is indubitably there. It seems to me that whether he actually does these fine things or not the American university student has succeeded in impressing the public with the idea that he is the kind of man who might do them. That in itself is no small achievement.

I wanted very much, because of the myth and for other reasons, to see something of American university life. I did see something, a little of it, both at Yale and Princeton.

I have heard it said that the Englishman is more attached to his school than to his university, that in after life he will think of himself as belonging to Eton, to Harrow, to Winchester, rather than to Oxford or to Cambridge. The school, for some reason, rather than the university, is regarded as "the mother" from whom the life of the man's soul flowed, to whom his affection turns. An Oxford man or a Cambridge man is indeed all his life long proud, as he very well may be, of his connection with his university, but his school is the subject of his deepest feeling. Round it rather than the university gathers that emotion which for want of better words may be described as educational patriotism. An Irishman, on the other hand, if he is a graduate of Dublin University, thinks more of "Trinity" than he does of his school. He may have been at one of the most famous English public schools, but his university, to a considerable extent, obliterates the memories of it. He thinks of himself through life as a T. C. D. man.

America is like Ireland in this respect. I find, looking back on my memories of the American men whom I met most frequently, that I know about several of them whether they are Yale men, Princeton men or Harvard men. I do not know about any single one of them what school they belonged to. I never asked any questions on the subject. Such information as I got came to me accidentally. It came to me without my knowing that I was getting it. Only afterwards did I realize that I knew A. to be a Yale man, B. to be a Harvard man and so forth. In England the information which comes unsought about a man concerns his school rather than his university. It is the name of his school which drops from his lips when he begins talking about old days. There are oftener books about his school than about his university on his shelves, photographs of his school on the walls of his study.

I do not know that there is in the American universities any definitely planned and deliberate effort to create or foster this spirit of patriotism. There is certainly no such effort apparent in Dublin University. The spirit is there. That is all that can be said. It pervades these institutions. Only an occasional and more or less eccentric undergraduate escapes its influence.

The patriotism is indeed much more obvious and vocal in America than in Dublin. We had the good luck to be present at a football match between Yale and Colgate Universities. It was not a match of first-rate importance, but an enormous crowd of spectators gathered to witness it. The excitement of the supporters of both sides was intense. There was no possible mistake about the fact that professors and undergraduates, old men who had graduated long ago and boys who were not yet undergraduates, wives, mothers and sisters of graduates and undergraduates, were all eagerly anxious about the result of the game. Yale, in the end, was quite unexpectedly beaten. It is not too much to say that a certain gloom was distinctly noticeable afterward everywhere in New Haven. It hung over people who were not specially interested in athletics of any kind. It affected the spirits of my host's parlormaid.

Very shortly after my return home I watched a football match between Dublin University and Oxford. The play was just as keen and sportsmanlike as the play between Yale and Colgate; but there was nothing like the same general interest in the game. There was a sprinkling of spectators round the ground, an audience which could not compare in size with that of Yale. They were interested in the game, intelligently interested. They applauded good play when they saw it; but there was nothing to correspond to the tense excitement which we witnessed in America. The game was a game. If Dublin won, well and good. If Oxford won, then Dublin must try to do better next time. No one feared defeat as a disaster. No one was prepared to hail victory with wild enthusiasm. A stranger could not have gone through New Haven on the day of the Yale and Colgate football match without being aware that something of great importance was happening. The whole town seemed to be streaming toward the football ground. In Dublin you might have walked not only through the city but through most parts of the college itself on the day of the match against Oxford and you would not have discovered, unless you went into the park, that there was a football match. Yet the pride of a Dublin man in his university is as deep and lasting as that of any American.

The reason of the difference is perhaps to be found in the fact that everything connected with university athletics is far more highly organized in America than on this side of the Atlantic. The undergraduate spectators are drilled to shout together. They practice beforehand songs which they sing on the occasion of the match for the encouragement of their own side. Young men with megaphones stand in front of closely packed rows of undergraduates. They give the signal for shouting. With wavings of their arms they conduct the yells of the crowd as musicians conduct their orchestras. The result is something as different as possible from the casual, accidental applause of our spectators. It is the difference between a winter rainstorm and the shower of an April morning. This organized enthusiasm affects everyone present. Sober-looking men and women shout and wave little flags tumultuously. They cannot help themselves. I understood, after seeing that football match, why it is that America produces more successful religious revivalists than England does. The Americans realize that emotion is highly infectious. They have mastered the art of spreading it. I do not know whether this is a useful art or not. It probably is, if the emotion is a genuine and worthy one; but it is not pleasant to think that one might be swept away, temporarily intoxicated, by the skill of some organizer who is engaged in propagating a morbid enthusiasm. However that may be, love for a university is a thoroughly healthy thing. It cannot be wrong to foster it by songs and shouts or even—a curious reversion to the totem religion of our remote ancestors—by identifying oneself with a bulldog or a tiger.

I met one evening some young men who had graduated in Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards gone over for a post-graduate course to a theological college connected with one of the American universities. We talked about Dublin chiefly, but I made one inquiry from them about their American experience.

"I suppose," I said, "that you have to work a great deal harder here than you did at home?"

Their answer was given with smiling assurance.

"Oh, dear no; nothing like so hard."

I should like very much to have further reliable information on this point. Something might be got, perhaps, by consulting a number of Rhodes scholars at Oxford. My impression, a vague one, is that the ordinary undistinguished American undergraduate is not required to work so hard as an undergraduate of the same kind is in England or Ireland. In an American magazine devoted to education I came across an article which complained that, in the matter of what may be called examination knowledge, the American undergraduate is not the equal of the English undergraduate. He does not know as much when he enters the university and he does not know as much when he leaves it. This was an American opinion. It would be very interesting to have it confirmed or refuted. But no one, on either side of the Atlantic, supposes that the kind of knowledge which is useful in examinations is of the first importance. The value of a university does not depend upon the number of facts which it can drive into the heads of average men; but on whether it can, by means of its teaching and its atmosphere, get the average man into the habit of thinking nobly, largely and sanely. It seems certain that the American university training does have a permanent effect on the men who go through it, an effect like that produced by English schools, and certainly also by English universities, on their students. A man who is, throughout life, loyal to his school or university has not passed through it uninfluenced. It seems likely that the American universities are succeeding in turning out very good citizens. The existence of what I have called the university student myth, the existence of a general opinion that university men are likely to be found on the side of civic righteousness, is a witness to the fact that the universities are doing their main work well.

The little, the very little I was able to see of university life helped me to understand how the work is being done. The chapel services, on weekdays and Sundays, were in many ways strange to me and I cannot imagine that I, trained in other rituals, would find digestible the bread of life which they provide. But I was profoundly impressed by the reality of them. Here was no official tribute to a God conceived of as a constitutional monarch to whom respect and loyalty is due but whose will is of no very great importance, a tribute saved perhaps from formality by the mystic devotion of a few; but an effort, groping and tentative no doubt, to get into actual personal touch with a divinity conceived of as not far remote from common life. These chapel services—exercises is the better word for them—can hardly fail to have a profound effect upon the ordinary man. I have stood in the chapel of Oriel College at Oxford and felt that now and then men of the finer kind, worshiping amid the austere dignity of the place, might grow to be saints, might see with their eyes and handle with their hands the mysterious Word of Life. I sat in the chapel at Princeton, I listened to a sermon at Yale, and felt that men of commoner clay might go out from them to face a battering from the fists and boots of Tammany gangsters.

It seems to me significant that Americans have not got the words "don" and "donnish." They are terms of reproach in England, but the very fact that they are in use proves that they are required. They describe what exists. The Americans have no use for the words because they have not got the man or the quality which they name. The teaching staffs of the American universities do not develop the qualities of the don. They do not tend to become a class apart with a special outlook upon life. It is possible to meet a professor—even a professor of English literature—in ordinary society, to talk to him, to be intimate with him and not to discover that he is a professor. Charles Lamb maintained that school-mastering left an indelible mark upon a man, that having school-mastered he never afterward was quite the same as other men. I had a friend once who boasted that he could "spot" a parson however he was dressed, had spotted parsons who were not dressed at all—in Turkish baths. I do not believe that the most careful student of professional mannerisms could detect an American professor out of his lecture room. It is possible that this note of ordinary worldliness in the members of the staff of the American university has a beneficial effect upon the students. It may help to suggest the thought that a university course is no more than a preparation for life, is not, as most of us thought once, a thing complete in itself.

In all good universities there is a broad democratic spirit among the undergraduates. They may, and sometimes do, despise the students of other universities as men of inferior class, but they only despise those of their fellow students in their own university who, according to the peculiar standards of youth, deserve contempt. In American universities this democratic spirit is stronger than it is with us because there is greater opportunity for its development. There are wider differences of wealth—it is difficult to speak of class in America—among the university students there than here. There are no men in English or Irish universities earning their keep by cleaning the boots and pressing the clothes of their better-endowed fellow students. In American universities there are such men and it is quite possible that one of them may be president of an important club, or captain of a team, elected to these posts by the very men whose boots he cleans. If he is fit for such honors they will be given him. The fact that he cleans boots will not stand in his way. The wisdom of medieval schoolmen made room in universities for poor students, sizars, servitors. The American universities, with their committees of employment for students who want to earn, are doing the old thing in a new way; and public opinion among the graduates themselves approves.

On the subject of the higher university education of girls American opinion is sharply divided. There are people there, just as there are in England, who say that the whole thing is a mistake, that it is better for girls not to go to college on any terms, under any system. I suppose that we must call these people reactionary. There cannot be very many of them anywhere. It was a surprise to me to find any at all in America. They are not, I think, very influential. Among those who favor the higher education of girls there are many who believe whole-heartedly in co-education. I had no opportunity of seeing a co-educational college, but I listened to a detailed description of the life in one from a lady who had lived it. According to her co-education is the one perfect system yet hit upon. Its critics urge two curiously inconsistent objections to it. One man, who is a philosopher and also seemed to know what he was talking about, told me that boys and girls educated together lose the sense of sex mystery, which lies at the base of romantic love and consequently do not want to marry. According to his theory, based upon a careful observation of facts, the students of co-educational universities never fall in love with each other or with anyone else. If the system were widely adopted and had this effect upon the students everywhere, the results would certainly be very unfortunate. Another critic, equally well informed, said that the real objection to co-education is that the students do little else except fall in love with each other. This, though no doubt educative in a broad sense of the word, is not exactly the kind of education we send boys and girls to universities to get. It must be very gratifying to the friends of the system to feel that these two objections cannot both be sound.

Co-educational colleges are chiefly to be found in the West, among the newer states. In the East girls get their higher education for the most part in colleges of their own. Smith College for instance has no connection with any of the men's universities. Nor has Vassar nor Bryn Mawr. These institutions have their own staffs, their own courses and examinations, their own rules, and confer their own degrees. Barnard College, on the other hand, is closely connected with Columbia University, occupying much the same position as Girton and St. Margaret's Hall do with regard to Cambridge and Oxford, scarcely as intimately joined to Columbia as Trinity Hall is to Dublin University. I had the opportunity of learning something of the life of Smith College. I was immensely impressed by the spirit of the place, as indeed I was by that of all the girls' schools and colleges which I saw. There was an infectious kind of eagerness about both pupils and teachers. There is a feeling of hopefulness. It is as if life were looked upon as a great and joyful adventure in which many discoveries of good things may be expected, much strenuous work may be done gladly, in which no disillusion waits for those who are of good heart. Not the girls alone, but those who teach and guide them, are young, young in the way which defies the passing of years to make them old. We are not young because we have seen eighteen summers and no more, or old, because we have seen eighty. We are old when we have shut the doors of our hearts against the desire of new things and steeled ourselves against the hope of good. We are young if we refuse, even when our heads are gray, to believe that disappointment inevitably waits for us. The world and everything in it belongs to the young. It is this pervading sense of youthfulness which makes the American girls' colleges so fascinating to a stranger. It is not difficult to believe that the girls who come out of them are able to take their places by the side of men in business life, or if the commoner and happier lot waits them, are well fitted to be the partners of men who do great things and the mothers of men who will do greater things still.

I take it that the American universities, both those for men and women, are the greatest things in America to-day. This, curiously enough, is not the American idea. The ordinary American citizen is proud of every single thing in his country except his universities. He is always a little apologetic about them. He compares his country with England and is convinced that America is superior in every respect, except the matter of universities. When he speaks of the English universities he shows a certain sense of reverence and makes mention of his own much in the spirit of Touchstone who introduced Audrey as "a poor thing, but my own."