I talked with the wife of a Princeton instructor, who was performing some clerical duties for her husband, and thereby had opportunities to “listen in” on Princeton education. She tells me of juniors and seniors in the great fashionable university, who would ask naive and childish questions about things that were going on in the world, revealing ignorance of which grammar school children would be ashamed. These elegant young idlers had been to college for three years, some of them four years, and had not learned to read a newspaper! Yet they were all eager to go to war, for a cause of which they understood nothing, and of which their leaders understood no more—as they proved to us before they got us out of the mess. Two years later there came as it were a colossal volcanic eruption, whereby Princeton culture, Princeton ideals and Princeton pieties were exploded over the entire globe. At present writing it appears that it will take mankind a hundred years to recover from the disasters that resulted. You, plain working men or business men who glance at this book, and think that college stupidity and corruption does not concern you, take this one fact and ponder it: millions of German and Austrian babies are hopelessly deformed by rickets, tens of millions of Russian peasants have perished of starvation, three hundred billions of human treasure and thirty million human lives were thrown away to no purpose—because, forty-five years ago, one student of Princeton College, Thomas Woodrow Wilson by name, was studying Hebrew, Greek, and imbecile theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and social engineering! CHAPTER XXVI THE BULL-DOG’S DEN A short journey on Mr. Morgan’s Pennsylvania Railroad, with its Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Wilson, Lafayette, Rutgers, Teachers’ College, Lehigh, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts Tech and University of Pennsylvania directors, and another short journey on Mr. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad, with its recent Harvard overseer for chairman, a Brown trustee for vice-president, a recent Yale president for director, and a member of the Yale advisory board, a Washburn trustee, a Wellesley trustee, a Pratt Institute trustee and two Harvard visitors for directors, and we find ourselves at the home of Princeton’s age-long rival, Old Eli; another carefully guarded fortress of the plutocracy, a ruling class munition factory, turning out mental bombs and poison gas for use in the class war.