fraternities is not by intellectual gauge or the
capability for comradeship, but the power to pay high dues and spend
lavishly. Of later years, in several conspicuous cases, even the choice
of college officials of high control has been guided rather by their
capacity as financiers than for ripened and inspiring scholarship.

"Then, too, the rack of constant change is detrimental to the finer grade
of civic sentiment. It would seem that the Island's significant Indian
name was wrought into its physical construction like the curse that kept
the Jew of fable a wanderer. Periodically the city is rent and upheaved
in unison with the surrounding changes of tide. Here one does not need to
live out his threescore years and ten to see the city of his youth slip
away from him. Even his Alma Mater packs her trunks and moves about too
rapidly to foster the undying loyal home spirit among her sons--my
college has lived in three houses since my freshman year. How I envy the
sons of Harvard, Yale, and all the rest who can go back, and, feeling at
least a scrap of the old campus turf beneath their feet, close their eyes
and be young again for one brief minute. Is not this the reason why so
many of Columbia's sons, in spite of the magnificent opportunities she
offers, send _their_ sons elsewhere, because they realize the value of
associations they have missed, and recognize the Whirlpool's
changefulness?

"What would be the feelings of an Oxford man, on returning from his life
struggle in India or Australia, to visit his old haunts, if he found, as
a sign of vaunted progress, the Bodleian Library turned into an
apartment house!

"The primal difference between civilized men and the nameless savage is
love of home, and the powerful races are those in whom this instinct is
the strongest. Such fealty is _not_ born in the shifting almost
tent-dwellers of Manhattan.

"It was in the late seventies, the winter before his passing, that one
mild night I walked home from a meeting of the Goethe Club in company
with the poet Bryant. He and my father had been stanch comrades, and many
a time had I studied his Homeric head silhouetted by firelight on our
library wall. As we crossed the Park front going from Fifth Avenue east
to west, he paused, and leaning on his cane gazed skyward, where the
outlines of some buildings, in process of construction on Fifty-ninth
Street, and then considered high, stood out against the sky. "'Poor New
York,' he sai