If the University of Kansas may, as I have been credibly informed, be considered as a typical western state university, then I must confess that my preconceptions regarding such institutions were as far from the facts as preconceptions, in general, are likely to be. The University of Kansas is anything but backward. It is, upon the contrary, amazingly complete and amazingly advanced. Not only has it an excellent equipment and a live faculty, but also a remarkably energetic, eager student body, much more homogeneous and much more unanimous in its hunger for education than student bodies in eastern universities, as I have observed them. The University of Kansas has some three thousand students, about a thousand of them women. Considerably more than half of them are either partly or wholly self-supporting, and 12 per cent. of them earn their way during the school months. The grip of the university upon the State may best be shown by statistics--if I may be forgiven the brief use of them. Out of 103 counties in Kansas only seven were not represented by students in the university in the years 1910-12--the seven counties being thinly settled sections in the southwest corner of the State. Seventy-three percent. of last year's students were born in Kansas; more than a third of them came from villages of less than 2,000 population; and the father of one out of every three students was a farmer. Life at the university is comfortable, simple, and very cheap, the average cost, per capita, for the school year being perhaps $200, including school expenses, board, social expenses, etc., nor are there great social and financial gaps between certain groups of students, as in some eastern colleges. The university is a real democracy, in which each individual is judged according to certain standards of character and behavior. "Now and again," one young man told me, with a sardonic smile, "we get a country boy who eats with his knife. He may be a mighty good sort, but he isn't civilized. When a fellow like that comes along, we take him in hand and tell him that, aside from the danger of cutting his mouth, we have certain peculiar whims on the subject of manners at table, and that it is better for him to eat as we do, because if he doesn't it makes him conspicuous. Inside a week you'll see a great change in a boy of that kind."