The Patient Observer | Page 9

in the leading
Western universities."
From the "Daily Princetonian" of February 13, 1933:
"Princeton won the intercollegiate championship yesterday with 63
points to Harvard's 37, Yale's 18, and 7 each for Brown, Williams, and
Pennsylvania. Princeton won by her brilliant work in the classics and
biology. Firsts were made by Bentley, who did the 220 lines of Homer
in 29-3/5 minutes, scanned 100 Alcaics from Horace in 62 seconds flat,
and hurdled over nine doubtful readings and seven lacunæ in the text of
Aristotle's 'Poetics' in 17-1/2 minutes. Two firsts went to Ramsdell,
who made only two errors in Protective Colouration and one error in
explaining the mutations of the Evening Primrose."
From the editorial columns of the New York "Evening Post" for July 7,
1933, and October 11, 1938:
(1) "Scholastic competitions have ceased to be the means to an end and
have become an end in themselves. The passion to win has swept away
every other consideration. Professionalism has laid its tainted hand on
the sports of our college youth. High-priced professors from the
University of Leipzig and the École des Hautes Études are engaged to
drill our teams to victory. Men who should have long ago taken their
Ph.D. have been known deliberately to flunk examinations so as to be
eligible for the 'varsity 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 encyclopædia 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 the stage where every fact laid

before him must be backed up with an adequate reason. What does a
bad Sultan do, he wished to know. Harrington was puzzled. It seemed a
pity to bring Bob into touch with the cruelties and pains of life. But on
the other hand here was a chance to inoculate Bob at a very early age
with a hatred for tyranny and oppression, and a love for the principles
of representative government; and on the whole I am inclined to think
Harrington did right. In any case Harrington told the boy that the bad
Sultan was in the habit of sending his soldiers to shoot people, and burn
down their homes, and take away everything they had to eat, and put all
the women into jail. He hesitated over the children. It was out of the
question to tell Bob how, by order of the bad Sultan, little children
were ripped open before their mothers' eyes, or had their brains dashed
out against the walls. The little children, Harrington finally told Bob,
were whipped by the bad