You have apparently confused the sincere and fine and beautiful expression of a great artist and a brilliant and original thinker with the crude vulgarities and obvious obscenities regularly on tap at smoker rallies, and with the corrupt literature which I have heard is sold to those who desire it by bell-boys and train-boys. At the smoker rally held late in November, the night before the annual California-Stanford football game, it did not strike my attention that you did anything to stop the bawdy stories and the frankly vulgar exhibition of dancing which a student in black-face gave with a dummy stuffed to represent a woman, but it did strike my attention that you sat through the spectacle in a seat in the front row, tacitly, by your silence, countenancing the whole affair. This spectacle, which was frankly vulgar and obscene, apparently did not arouse in you any of the moral indignation which the letter of Mr. Lawrence did, a letter which I repeat is not obscene or corrupt or degenerate, but fine and sincere and beautiful. CHAPTER XXXII THE STORY OF STANFORD Thirty miles south of San Francisco, sheltered behind the coast range of mountains, lies the great institution with whose students the “Golden Bear” does its fighting. Stanford University was founded by one of the “Big Four” railroad kings, who for forty years or more plundered the people of California. Like other railroad kings, Leland Stanford amused himself by purchasing racehorses and state legislators, but he differed from the rest in that he had a respect for knowledge. He wanted to be a trustee of the University of California, and when he failed, he decided to start a rival institution. When his only son died in early youth, the heart-broken old man chose this means of perpetuating the boy’s name, and he pledged to Leland Stanford, Jr., University his land, his racehorses, and a part of his railroad stock; also a valuable asset in the form of David Starr Jordan, a scientist and teacher with some real interest in democracy. Senator Stanford died in the midst of the panic of 1893, and his university was in a predicament; there was no money on hand, and it was impossible to sell any land, and parasites and blackmailers gathered in a swarm—relatives and friends, legislators whom the senator had kept on his payroll, newspaper editors and publishers he had used. The editor of one San Jose newspaper sent in a bill for twenty-five hundred dollars advertising—he had printed news about the opening of the university! Senator Stanford left a hundred thousand dollars to every relative he could find, hoping thereby to buy them off; but within twenty-four hours of his death one of his relatives in New York forged his name to a check for a hundred thousand dollars; another relative, a woman, was shot by her husband, a gambler, because she did not get her money quickly enough!