Unfortunately the students have until lately had nothing that could be called a gymnasium, in which they might counterpoise nerve-work with muscular action. At one time they endeavored to equip a modest building. In the Legislature, however, the average representative, the man who voted supplies, looked back upon his own boyhood, and, recalling that he never suffered indigestion while following the plough down the brown furrow, set his head against granting one dollar of the State’s supplies for the deed fool athletics; in fact, he lapsed for the moment into the mental condition of, say, a Tory of Tom Jones’s time or a hater of the oppressed races of to-day. This one instance will possibly give a shadow of impression of the power base politics--reversions to conditions our race is evolving from--have had in Hesperus University life. The power was obtained in the beginning chiefly because of the University’s sources of financial support--appropriations by biennial Legislatures in which every item, the salary of each individual professor, was scanned, and talked over, and cut down to the lowest bread-and-water figure, first by the committee in charge of the budget and afterwards by the Legislature in full session. One instance alone illustrates. In the early spring of 1897, when the University estimate was before the Legislature for discussion and the dominating Populists were endeavoring to reduce its figure, a legislator sturdily insisted: “They’re too stingy down there at the University. They’re getting good salaries, and could spare a sum to some one who would undertake to put the appropriations through.” One thousand dollars was said to be “about the size of the job.” A cut of twenty per cent., generally speaking, upon already meagre salaries resulted to a faculty too blear-eyed politically and unbusiness-like to see its financial advantage. After two or three years the stipends were restored to their former humility, the Legislature possibly having become ashamed. And in the make-up of the senatus academicus, or board of regents, thereby hangs, or there used to hang, much of doubt and many a political trick and quibble. It was a variation of the dream of the Texas delegate to the nominating convention--“The offices! That’s what we’re here for.” For if a Democratic governor were elected, he appointed from his party men to whom he was beholden in small favors. The members of the board were Democrats, that is, and were expected to guard the interests of their party. Or if the voters of Hesperus chose a Republican executive, he in turn had his abettors whom he wanted to dignify with an academic course for which there were no entrance examinations beyond faithfulness to party lines and party whips. It thus happened that the fitness of the man has not always been a prime consideration in his appointment. More often because he was somebody’s henchman, or somebody’s friend, the executive delighted to honor him.