Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/273

Rh incorporated unconsciously and as a matter of course, much of the spirit of democracy into their organization. The spirit of common fellowship often pervaded the life of the faculty and students. They were intellectual brotherhoods like families or fraternities in spirit. The gradual, quiet transformation that now has made of them, perhaps, the most imperialistic, educational institutions in the world is not so difficult to account for. This has been a land of freedom and opportunity. There have been all kinds of things lying around loose in America—virgin soil, virgin forests, virgin mineral lands, virgin society and virgin politics. The liveliest and strongest have gone after the benefits, appropriated them, taken means to hold possession against the covetous, and then, alas! have found themselves unwittingly, as a result of wealth, social preferment and political power, proud, arrogant and irresponsible, and pitted against their fellows. Those who have not been lucky themselves have nevertheless had something of hero-worship in their veins. They have admired Napoleonic success and Anglo-Saxon strenuousness. They have passively paid tribute and so have had their part in the immoderate inequalities that have sprung up. The inevitable outcome of it all has been a harvest of captains of industry, captains of wealth, captains of politics and captains of education.

Do I dare say aught in this place about college presidents? If so, it would be in the "spirit of sweet charity," They have had their temptations and trials; they are subject to weakness of the flesh; they have been battered and buffeted, and whatever is said about them must be spoken in kindly sympathy. They are not vicious, they are not "exploiters of genius"; they are not worshippers at the shrine of mammon, nor devotees of the God Thor with his symbol of the arm and hammer; they are just human. Like all of the other citizens in our primitive republic, with its free opportunity, they have seen a good many things lying around loose. This time it has not been some irrigation stream or mineral deposit that they saw lying unclaimed, but the opportunity for power. No one else had been exercising it, and why not they? Indeed, they have gathered of the treasure in large measure, and why not? Men do love power if they are normal. There is no better thing in the moral order than a will that can produce, create and help things along. There is not a more righteous joy than the feeling of that fine tension of a strong will that can be a living force in the world. But enough is a sufficiency, and too much, even of a good thing, is dangerous. And men are human. Let us say, with gracious compassion, that it is the fault of the times, of our social order, that has placed in the hands of presidents the power of life and death over the professional career of members of the faculty and also the shaping of the destinies of our educational institutions.