The Herr Director thought I was very hard upon the poor fellow, and later I had a good talk with him. I tried to show him that his Bohemian, peasant origin ought to be a source of pride to him. That the very fact that he and his people had come out of the steerage, and by virtue of our democratic institutions could rise to the point where they could send him to college, should make him a guardian of the American Spirit and not its foe. I do not know that he profited by what I said; for I often find myself talking to the wind and the tide, and they are both against me. I have only pity for the gilded youth who go to an American college with its vast opportunities of human contact, yet fail to see any one outside their own social boundaries. After all, the chief glory of our educational institutions is that their best things are still democratic. No man is kept from the Holy of Holies, from sound learning, from the contact with scholarly minds, from good books, and enough of rich fellowship to make going to college worth while. We heard one delightful story which is so typically American and so reveals the American Spirit at its best, that the Herr Director embodied it in his book. The president of a Quaker college told us that just as he found there was some danger that the men who had to work their way through, were losing caste, one of the upper classmen opened a boot and shoe mending and cleaning shop. As he was a man of means, whose standing in his group was unquestioned, his action took from common labor its ever renewing curse. In many of the colleges we met groups of men so full of this spirit, so concerned with fostering it, that all the snobberies of which we had heard seemed even smaller than they were in their own right. We met those who gave their leisure hours to that most difficult and worthy task of Americanizing the immigrants who, in many instances, almost encroached upon the campus. The students visited them in the box-cars where they lived, or in the hovels where they reared children; they taught them English and the elements of good citizenship, and every one of them had some particular Antonio to whom he was devoted, and whom he was trying to lift to his level. Although the general testimony was that the students had gained more from the contact than the immigrants had, I know how immeasurably much it means to these strangers to have leaning up against their own lonely souls men of culture, and sweet, clean breath, and brotherly heart. It is this idealism in our college youth which is so precious an asset that to lose it would mean bankruptcy to our educational institutions.