Some of the old American colleges have been accused from time to time of encouraging snobbery and a spirit of aristocracy which is not in harmony with American ideas of democracy. My personal experience as student at Columbia gives competency to my opinion upon that subject. Snobs will be found in every country and clime, but there were fewer snobs at Columbia in those days than in many other much less exalted places, although Columbia at that time was accused of being a nest of dudes and snobs. This was one of the arguments advanced by those friends of mine at the Adelphi Academy who tried to persuade me to go to Princeton or Yale. The spirit of aristocracy was there, but it was an aristocracy of the same kind as existed in my native peasant village. It was a spirit of unconscious reverence for the best American traditions. I say “unconscious,” and by that I mean absence of noisy chauvinism and of that racial intolerance by which the Teutonism of Austria and the Magyarism of Hungary had driven me away from Prague and from Panchevo. A name with a fine American tradition back of it attracted much attention, but it was only a letter of recommendation. He who was found wanting in his make-up and in his conduct when weighed by the best Columbia College traditions--and they were a part of American traditions--had a lonely time during his college career, in spite of his illustrious name or his family’s great wealth. Foreign-born students, like Cubans and South Americans, met with a respectful indifference so long as they remained foreigners. Needless to say, many of them adopted rapidly the attractive ways of the Columbia boys. But nobody would have resented it, or even paid any attention to it, if they had retained their foreign ways. A hopeless fellow became a member of that very small class of students known at that time as “muckers.” They complained bitterly of snobbery and of aristocracy. I do not believe that either the spirit of plutocracy, or of socialism and communism, or of any other un-American current of thought could ever start from an American college like Columbia of those days, and bore its way into American life. That type of aristocracy which made the American college immune from contagion by un-American influence existed; it was very exacting, and it was much encouraged. But when American college boys, accused of bowing to the spirit of aristocracy, have among them a Hamilton, a Livingston, a DeWitt, and several descendants of Jay, and yet elect for class president the penniless son of a Serbian peasant village, because they admire his mental and physical efforts to learn and to comply with Columbia’s traditions, one can rest assured that the spirit of American democracy was very much alive in those college boys.