He values openly what the world in its heart knows is best, and like all idealists foreruns his time. The legend is always about him of how the men and women of the early fifties hitched their wagon to a star--and the stars in his infinity above are divinely luminous and clear. His meliorism--which would lead his fellows and then the whole world aright--is nothing if not magnificent. But although he grubs up the wild rose and morning-glory, ploughing his mellow soil deep for settings of peach and grape, and supplants the beauty of the purple iris and prairie verbena with the practicalities of corn and wheat, he has yet to learn the moral effect of time and aggregation--that a moon’s cycle is not a millennium, a June wind fragrant with the honey of his white clover not all of his fair climate, and that a political colossus cannot stand when it has no more substantial feet than the yellow clay which washes and swirls in the river that waters his great State. In reality his excess of faith hinders the way to conditions his idealism has ever been seeking. The Kansan is, after all, but a phase--a magnificent present-day example and striving--of the mighty democratic spirit which has been groping forward through centuries towards its ideal, the human race’s ideal of ideals. In his setting forth of the genius of his people for democracy and the tendency of his blood for experiment and reform--according to that advice to the Thessalonians of an avaunt courier of democracy, to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good--he is led at times upon miry, quaggy places and by the very largeness of his sympathies enticed upon quicksands which the social plummet of our day has not yet sounded. THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH No university has anywhere ever become a great influence, or anything but a school for children, which was not wholly or almost wholly in the hands of the faculty or teaching body. _The faculty is the teaching body._ If you have the right sort of faculty, you have a university though you have only a tent to lecture in. If, on the other hand, you try to make a university out of a board of sagacious business men acting as trustees, and treat the professors simply as “hired men,” bound to give the college so many hours a week, you may have a good school for youths, but you will get no enlightening influence or force out of it for the community at large. A writer in _The Nation_, 1889 THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS During a great national struggle for human rights, Laurel Town was touched by the high seriousness which rises from sincerity to the idea of human liberty and the laying down of lives in defence of that idea. Its baptism and its early years were thus purely of the spirit.