contests. Promising students in the
preparatory schools are bribed to enroll with this or that college. The
whole problem of summer mathematics reeks to heaven. It is not enough
that a student during eight months of the year will put in all his
time on invariants and the theory of numbers. Vacation time finds him
at some fashionable resort, tutoring the sons of millionaires in
multiplication and quadratic equations."

(2) "Thus our so-called student 'activities' are neither active in the
true sense, nor fit for students. There has grown up a small clan of
intellectual athletes who win victories while thousands of mediocre
students, six feet and over and having an average weight of 195 pounds,
stand around and cheer. Our student-managers have become men of
business, purely. The receipts at the last Harvard-Yale debate on the
popular election of United States senators amounted to more than
$50,000. The Greek philology team spends three-quarters of its time in
touring the country. The _Evening Howl_ prints the pictures of the
[Greek: Phi Beta Kappa] members every other day. It is time to call a
halt."

VI

ON CALLING WHITE BLACK

If it were not for the deadly hatred that exists between Bob, who will
be four years old very soon, and Abdul Hamid II, late Sultan of Turkey,
I hardly know what would become of my moral standards. Whenever my sense
of right and wrong grows blunted; whenever the inextricable confusion of
good and bad in everything about us becomes unusually depressing, I have
only to recall how virulent, how inflexible, how certain is Bob's
judgment on the character and career of the deposed Ottoman despot.

Bob is Harrington's youngest son. He and Abdul Hamid II first met in the
pages of a fat new history of the Turkish Revolution having a white
star and crescent on the cover and perhaps half a hundred pictures
inside. The book immediately supplanted the encyclopaedia and General
Kuropatkin's illustrated memoirs of the Russo-Japanese War, in Bob's
affections. Who, he wanted to know, was the swarthy, lean, hook-nosed
gentleman in a tasselled cap, who stood up in a carriage to acknowledge
the cheers of the crowd. That, Harrington told him, was a bad Sultan,
and tried to turn to the next picture, which showed an unhappy-looking
Armenian priest casting his first vote for a member of Parliament.

But the boy has for some years been in t