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

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The manners and traditions of Princeton are English; the architecture, the ivy, and the elaborate carelessness of the men’s attire. Strolling about the campus you might be in the midst of one of those interminable English novels, in which the hero goes first through the public school and eats at “tuck-shops,” and then meanders up to Cambridge or Oxford, and gracefully loiters for two hundred pages, punting on the river, reading a few random books of poetry, and seducing a girl or two. Princeton is the home of the graces, the most perfect school of snobbery in America. It is meant for gentlemen’s sons, and no nonsense about it; no Negroes, few Jews or Catholics if they are known. The society clubs run, not merely the campus, but the faculty, and the endowment is presided over by the prettiest bunch of plutocrats yet assembled in our empire of education.

The grand duke of Princeton was, until he died last year, Mr. Taylor Pyne, numbered among a score of the wealthiest men in the wealthiest country in the world. Mr. Pyne was a director in the National City Bank, one of the three great institutions of the money trust; he was also a director of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, and of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, one of the great honey-pots of Wall Street. It was on Mr. Pyne’s cool green lawns that I watched the peacocks and lyre-birds, in the days when I had come back from the Chicago stockyards, white and sick with the horror of what I had seen.