Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/272

268 daily actions. Even the community in which he lives is prone to scorn his efforts to play a part in the settlement of the questions that intimately concern him.

A few years ago internal troubles in one of our universities led to a rumor that the president had asked for the resignation of every member of the faculty. In consequence of this a mass meeting of the students was called, but before the students assembled a message was sent them by the president saying that no meeting would be permitted unless the students agreed to act in accordance with his wishes.

A few days later one of the city papers in discussing the situation said editorially,

Nevertheless, tradition does not always remain impregnable and there are signs of weakness in some of its strongholds. The college student may have come from a school city where in a public high school he has had some small share in educational legislation and administration. He may have entered from a private secondary school where self-government has attained a vigorous growth. If in college his abilities lead him into the field of science, the spirit of investigation he meets there turns his questioning mind to the investigation of education; if his interests lie in political science the organization of the state directs his thoughts to the organization of education; if he is absorbed in economics, the question of the mutual relations of capital and labor, of employer and employee, of the individual and the state lead to questions of the mutual relationship of all parties concerned in education; the very process of education trains him in mental activity and he is quick to apply this activity to the study of the conditions in which he is placed.

Again, he can not escape the discussion of all phases of the question as it is presented in the daily press and in current periodicals. The spirit of research, of investigation and of inquiry in every form is abroad in every land, and it has its influence on the college student. Democracy in the state, in society, in industry, is taking on new meanings and is making new applications. Experiments in self-government are being tried in reformatory, corrective and penal institutions, and even hospitals for the feeble-minded and for the insane are turning to the same plan as part of their remedial treatment.