Developing this news angle for a few paragraphs, we eventually came to
the unfortunate fist fight between Kempton of Yale and Gaston of Harvard
which led to both men being put out of the game. It was our bad luck to
see nothing but the last half second of the encounter. As a truthful
reporter we made this admission but naturally went on to add, "Of
course, we assume that Kempton started it." For weeks we continued to
receive letters from Yale undergraduates beginning, "My attention has
been called to your article" and continuing to ask with great violence
how a reporter could possibly tell who started a fight without seeing
the beginning of it. Some letters of like import were from Princeton
men.
Princeton is always quick to rally to the defense of Yale against
Harvard. This suggests a possibly common meeting ground for Harvard and
Yale. Of course, they can hardly meet on the basis of a common language
for the speech of Yale is quite alien. For instance, they call their
"yard" a "campus." Also, there are obvious reasons why they cannot meet
as equal members in the fellowship of educated men. Since this is a
nonpartisan article designed to promote good feeling it will probably be
just as well not to go into this. Though football is the chief interest
at New Haven, Yale men often display a surprising sensitiveness to
attacks on the scholarship of their local archaeologists. Nor will
religion do as a unifier. Yale is evangelical and prays between the
halves, while Harvard is mostly agnostic, if it isn't Unitarian. No,
just one great cause can be discovered in which Harvard men and Yale men
can stand shoulder to shoulder and lift their voices in a common cause.
Each year some public spirited citizen ought to hire Madison Square
Garden and turn it over to all graduates and undergraduates of Harvard
and of Yale for a great get-together meeting in which past differences
should be forgotten in one deep and full throated shout of "To Hell with
Princeton!"
Bacillus and Circumstance
IT is evening in the home of Peter J. Cottontail. The scene is a
conventional parlor of a rabbit family of the upper middle class. About
the room there is the sort of furniture a well-to-do rabbit would have,
and on the shelves the books you would naturally expect. _Leaves of
Grass_ is there, of course; possibly _Cabbages and Kings_, and perhaps a
volume or two of _The Winning of the West_, with a congratulatory
inscription from the author. The walls have one or two good prints of
hunting scenes and an excellent lithographic likeness of Thomas Malthus,
but most of the space is given over to photographs of the family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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