President Wheeler having been intimate with the German kaiser, and ardent in his defense, the interlocking regents wanted somebody else to attend to their interests in war-time. What more natural than to turn to their Dean of Imperialism? They made him president, and he put “ginger” into the system of military training. Twelve thousand students get a free education, but must pay for it by taking two years of military training, fifty-five hours a year. A part of this training consists in learning to plunge a bayonet into an imitation human body, and you must growl savagely while you do this, and one student found it so realistic that he fainted and was dismissed from the university. Under President Barrows’ administration the best land of the university has been taken for an artillery field, and Strawberry Canyon, the one beauty spot available for nature lovers, has been taken for a million dollar “stadium,” to be used for athletic tourneys. One professor resigned in protest against this vandalism; but President Barrows believes ardently in athletics, because it trains those strong young men who are to carry the flag from the North Pole to the South. He publicly stated that one advantage of having a big university is that you have abundant material from which to select athletic teams. In other parts of the world, when you hear of the “classics,” you think of Homer and Virgil; but in California the “classics” are the annual Stanford-California foot-ball game, and the intercollegiate track-meet, and the Pacific Coast tennis doubles. I visited the university this spring, and was invited to a fraternity house. These well-groomed young gladiators did not know quite how to talk to a Socialist author, so between courses of the dinner they relieved their embarrassment by singing, or rather shouting in very loud tones—and I observed that their songs invariably dealt with fighting somebody. I asked a student about to graduate what he thought of his classmates, and his answer was, “They are a mob of little haters. They hate the Germans, they hate the Russians, they hate the Socialists, they hate the Japs. They are ready to hate the French or the English any time they are told to; and always they hate Stanford.” Stanford, you understand, is a rival university, and they carry in triumph a battle-ax which they captured from this enemy many years ago; their military president and professors encourage this kind of play ferocity, as training for the setting up of slaughter-houses later on. These future world conquerors are pleased to portray themselves under the terrifying symbol of the Golden Bear. Almost every college is some kind of wild animal, you know; Princeton is a Tiger, and Yale is a Bull-dog, and they all sing songs about eating somebody up. At Harvard they tell you that the motto Veritas, means “To hell with Yale,” and at New Haven they pledge their devotion in a carefully ordered climax, “For God, for country, and for Yale.”