Stanford is like any other university in this relation to its graduates. But there seems to be something unusually strong and yet at the same time unusually intangible in the ties that bind its former students to it. Perhaps the explanation lies as much in the special character of its students, at least its pioneer ones, as in the special character of the institution itself. The students who came to Stanford in its earlier years came because it was different from other colleges, and because they did this it is likely that they themselves were different from other students. Like the restless, seeking pioneers that came over the desert and mountains to the Pacific Coast to find a different life from that of worn tradition and old ways, their descendants and the later coming youth, who had mixed with them and been infected by their seeking spirit, flocked to this institution that offered a different kind of college atmosphere. Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission buildings of yellow stone and heavy red tiles, nestling under high hills that run back to mountains, surrounded by wide grain fields flecked with rounded live-oaks and tall strange eucalyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns and well-kept paddocks and exercising tracks in which sleek trotting horses of famous Palo Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a strange new setting for studying Greek and Latin and mathematics and science. "_Die Luft der Freiheit weht_" is the Stanford motto; and there was truly no more likely place for the winds of freedom to blow than over and through this college on a California ranch. And its founders did well to find for its first head a man than whom no other American scholar had given clearer indications of being anxious to break with clogging scholastic tradition. The university itself, so tenderly conceived as a memorial to a boy lost to his parents, and so generously established as an opportunity for other boys, some of whom, like the hero of our story, might have had their parents lost to them, is an almost unique example of a great educational institution maintained by the fortune of a single family. All of the Stanford millions are returned today to the country in which they were accumulated in the form of a great endowment and of the beautiful halls in which thousands of students have found a free training for independent existence and right citizenship. These students wear the Stanford cardinal as a red badge of obligation, not anarchy. No other college in the country had more of its sons and daughters, in proportion to their total number, devoting themselves to their country's service during the Great War. If Herbert Hoover was the most distinguished of the serving sons of Stanford he was not more eager and devoted than many others.