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."