The manners and traditions of Princeton are English; the architecture, the ivy, and the elaborate carelessness of the men’s attire. Strolling about the campus you might be in the midst of one of those interminable English novels, in which the hero goes first through the public school and eats at “tuck-shops,” and then meanders up to Cambridge or Oxford, and gracefully loiters for two hundred pages, punting on the river, reading a few random books of poetry, and seducing a girl or two. Princeton is the home of the graces, the most perfect school of snobbery in America. It is meant for gentlemen’s sons, and no nonsense about it; no Negroes, few Jews or Catholics if they are known. The society clubs run, not merely the campus, but the faculty, and the endowment is presided over by the prettiest bunch of plutocrats yet assembled in our empire of education. The grand duke of Princeton was, until he died last year, Mr. Taylor Pyne, numbered among a score of the wealthiest men in the wealthiest country in the world. Mr. Pyne was a director in the National City Bank, one of the three great institutions of the money trust; he was also a director of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, and of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, one of the great honey-pots of Wall Street. It was on Mr. Pyne’s cool green lawns that I watched the peacocks and lyre-birds, in the days when I had come back from the Chicago stockyards, white and sick with the horror of what I had seen. The second grand duke of Princeton is Cyrus H. McCormick, head of the International Harvester Company, also a director in the National City Bank. The third grand duke is William Cooper Procter, the Ivory Soap magnate, who tried to buy the presidency of the United States for General Wood. Mr. Procter is also a director in the National City Bank—quite a smell of Standard Oil on the Tiger’s coat, you notice! The fourth grand duke is Robert Garrett, the biggest banker of Baltimore, whose brownstone mansion was one of the wonders of my childhood. All the above are life-trustees of Princeton; and to assist them they have two more bankers, and a Philadelphia lawyer who is a director in the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the Lehigh Railroad and the Lehigh Coal Company; a cotton manufacturer who is a member of the Republican Campaign Committee; a Pittsburgh merchant who is director in a national bank; the secretary-treasurer of the United Railroads of New Jersey; the president of the United States Trust Company; a publisher who is a director of two banks, a lawyer who is director of two insurance companies, and another who is chairman of a railroad, and another who is attorney for the Prudential Life. No unsound or subversive ideas need apply at Princeton! And the just reward of all this respectability was reaped when H. C. Frick, the steel king, died, and left a great part of his fortune to the university.