They kicked Woodrow Wilson upstairs, and put in his place a Presbyterian clergyman by the name of John Grier Hibben, snob to his fingertips, a timid little man who compensates for his own sheltered life by being in his imaginings a ferocious militarist, clamoring for all kinds of slaughter. He is an active director in half a dozen organizations for the purpose of getting us ready for every war in sight, and only the other day he was calling at Commencement for us to “bring down our fist on the council-table of Europe” and to “take Russia by the throat”—using, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very same words that we heard a few years ago from Wilhelm Hohenzollern! President Hibben was educated at the University of Berlin; a curious fact which I note about one after another of these academic drill-sergeants—Butler of Columbia, Berlin—Lowell of Harvard, Berlin—Smith of Pennsylvania, Goettingen! These we have met so far; and next we shall meet Angell of Yale, Berlin—Wheeler of California, Heidelberg—Wilbur of Stanford, Frankfurt and Munich—everyone of them learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser! CHAPTER XXV PEACOCKS AND SLUMS Evans Clark, now of the Labor Bureau in New York, was for three years a “preceptor” at Princeton, and tried to interest the young men in what was going on in the outside world; among other things he assigned them Walter Lippmann’s “Preface to Politics” as a book to read. I remember that I made a diligent “go” at this book, to find out what Lippmann meant and what he wanted; but I never could, and I doubt if any Princeton under-graduate could do more. However, Professor William Starr Myers of the department of history, a popular orator at ladies’ clubs, thought it was a terrible book, and pleaded with Clark that he was “taking an unfair advantage of immature minds!” A professor at another university, who knows Professor Myers well, tells me that “he is, next to Cal Coolidge and Ole Hanson, the most consummate ass on radicalism in the country. He is the lion of the afternoon pink teas.” As always, where you have smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds on them, you also have vile and filthy slums, in which babies die of typhoid and dysentery, and little children grow up crooked and poisoned for life. In this elegant aristocratic university town are some of the worst slums in the world; the Rev. Edward A. Steiner, author of “The Trail of the Immigrant,” was brought to Princeton to preach, and he inspected them, and writes me: “The housing conditions at Princeton were about as I have found in the most congested district of New York. Under the shadow of three million dollar dormitories were tenements of the worst type. They were occupied by colored and white help.”[H]