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

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“Flesh and blood cooden bear it. ‘My lord,’ says I, laying my hand upon my busm, ‘only give me security, and I’m yours forever.’

“The old noblemin grin’d, and pattid me on the shoulder. ‘Right, my lad,’ says he, ‘right—you’re a nice promising youth. Here is the best security.’ And he pulls out his pocketbook, returns the hundred-pun bill, and takes out one for fifty. ‘Here is half today; tomorrow you shall have the remainder.’” And so Dean West became the master of the Graduate School of Princeton; according to the terms of the gift he and another man hold the purse-strings. Up with the aristocratic tradition, and good-bye to elegant and studied carelessness! Everybody in the Graduate School of Princeton must wear an academic gown for dinner!

They kicked Woodrow Wilson upstairs, and put in his place a Presbyterian clergyman by the name of John Grier Hibben, snob to his fingertips, a timid little man who compensates for his own sheltered life by being in his imaginings a ferocious militarist, clamoring for all kinds of slaughter. He is an active director in half a dozen organizations for the purpose of getting us ready for every war in sight, and only the other day he was calling at Commencement for us to “bring down our fist on the council-table of Europe” and to “take Russia by the throat”—using, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very same words that we heard a few years ago from Wilhelm Hohenzollern! President Hibben was educated at the University of Berlin; a curious fact which I note about one after another of these academic drill-sergeants—Butler of Columbia, Berlin—Lowell of Harvard, Berlin—Smith of Pennsylvania, Goettingen! These we have met so far; and next we shall meet Angell of Yale, Berlin—Wheeler of California, Heidelberg—Wilbur of Stanford, Frankfurt and Munich—everyone of them learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser!