something disgusting.

You know it yourself, Bill. Didn't you go to Yellagain where the police
arrested the whole Freshman class for painting the Sophomores green?
Well, it's the same way all over. No sooner does a college town get big
enough to support a rudimentary policeman who peddles vegetables when
he isn't putting down anarchy than it gets busy and begins to regulate
the college students. And the bigger it gets the more regulating it
wants to do. Why, they tell me that at the University of Chicago there
hasn't been a riot for nine years, and that over in Washington Park,
three blocks away, an eleven-ton statue of old Chris. Columbus has lain
for ages and no college class has had spirit enough to haul it out on
the street-car tracks. That's what regulating a college does for it.
There are more policemen in Chicago than there are students in the
University. If you give your yell off the campus you have to get a
permit from the city council. It's worse than that in Philadelphia, they
tell me. Why, there, if a college student comes downtown with a
flareback coat and heart-shaped trousers and one of those nifty little
pompadour hats that are brushed back from the brow to give the brains a
chance to grow, they arrest him for collecting a crowd and disturbing
traffic. No, sir, no big-town college for me. Getting college life in
those places reminds me of trying to get that world-wide feeling on
ice-cream soda. There's as much chance in one as in the other.

Excuse me for getting sore, but that's the way I do when I begin to talk
about college towns. They don't know their places. Take Jonesville,
where Siwash is, for instance. When Siwash College was founded by "that
noble band of Christian truth seekers," as the catalogue puts it,
Jonesville was a mud-hole freckled with houses. The railroad trains
whistled "get out of my way" to the town when they whooped through it,
and when you went into a merchant's store and woke him up he started off
home to dinner from force of habit. The only thing they ever regulated
there was the clock. They regulated that once a year and usually found
that it was two or three days behind time. Hadn't noticed it at all.

That's what Jonesville was when Siwash started. You can bet for the
first forty years they didn't do much regulating around the college. The
students just let the town stay there because it was quiet. The citizens
used to elect town marshals over seventy years old, so their g