For the peculiar evil of the governing body type is its failure to understand its lack of finality. It has no sense of the unknown, no sense of the provisional nature of all mundane things. It wants to fix knowledge in its own image, to make subsidiary and to apportion and departmentalise the work of the gifted exceptional and disturbing men. It seeks to set up classics, to perpetuate existing institutions, to inaugurate ancestor worship. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler is to be the American Confucius and stereotype this perfect world of 1924; the last of the Founders. The coming generation will learn that at this point the world congealed. The thing this dominating type dreads supremely is revolutionary suggestion and the possibility of the young getting away with new ideas. Its educational ideal is blinkers and an obedient youth looking neither to the right nor the left, but pursuing the one right path. But the sustaining factor of life is death. Happily, most happily, Founders die, and their codes and constitutions, their classical utterances, die and pass away. Even the inspired addresses and deliverances of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, so beautifully printed and so relentlessly distributed, will some day shrivel and pass, and be no more heeded. So that life may go on. Without death there could be no birth. The most fundamental fact about youth is its disrespect for its elders and the past. That is what it is for. A generation that wanted to repeat the preceding generation would not be birth, it would be life stuttering. And the one thing youth does most need and want and fight to get, as its supreme instinctive duty, is and always will be every sort of destructive criticism of existing authorities, of the existing order, and of established institutions. Young America at Harvard probably has no illusions about Mr. Debs or Mr. Foster; it calls them, I am reasonably certain, “Old Debs” and “Old Foster.” But it means to hear them, it will hear them, and the college authorities had better help it to hear without any attempts whatever to jam the message Old Debs and Old Foster have to deliver against the old system young Harvard has been born to alter--and has been born for no other apparent end that I can see.