Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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Then I would go into the library and work for a couple of hours, and come out late at night, and see these same young leaders of the future come staggering out of their clubhouses to vomit in the gutter. The public was told that drinking was forbidden in these clubs; but I saw what I saw. I suspected that the tall gentleman in the black coat and silk hat must also know what was going on, and that therefore he did not mean his golden words to be taken with entire literalness. If only there had been some way by which I could have warned the world concerning this eloquent college president who did not mean his golden words—what a tragedy to mankind might have been averted!

I did not meet Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, but I met a good many of his professors. I called on his professor of literature, Henry Van Dyke, poet and scholar, a dear amiable gentleman who had about as much idea of the realities of modern capitalism as had the roses in his garden. I met some of his students—I took walks over the hills with one who had literary aspirations, and considered Tennyson’s poems to Queen Victoria the highest imaginative flight of our age. This earnest young man discovered that I admired a disreputable English free-lover by the name of Shelley; and so our acquaintance died. Another time my family was away, and I lived in town in a student boarding-house; I turn weak even now when I think of those solemn, pale, black-clad young men from the theological seminary, eating their thin and watery meals, and living in a state of mind precisely as if the last hundred and fifty years had never happened to anybody.