These facts are known to many who are interested in the university; they were known to Thorstein Veblen, who was a professor in Stanford for three years. In 1918 Veblen published a book entitled, “The Higher Learning in America,” in which he referred briefly to this scandal. But his sense of politeness toward the university caused him to withhold its name—which got him into trouble with Professor Brander Matthews. If I tell you this story, it will lead us off the trail of Stanford for a page or two; but it will teach us about the prestige of universities and how it is maintained, and we shall thus be better able to understand the Stanford skeleton, and how it has been kept hidden all these years. I am told by a person high up in Columbia University that it was Nicholas Murray Butler, sitting in his high watch-tower and keeping guard over his empire of education, who first saw this dangerous book of Veblen’s, and turned it over to his henchman, Brander Matthews, to be “slated.” Matthews wrote what was supposed to be a book review, but was really an assassination, and the New York “Times,” which exists to perform these little services for the plutocracy, gave it prominence. Matthews found one trivial grammatical error in Veblen’s book, and another printer’s error which could be laid to Veblen; on this basis he accused of illiteracy the most brilliant economic satirist in the world! Because of Veblen’s politeness in failing to name Stanford, Brander Matthews described him as “a creature who creeps up stealthily with a stiletto to deal a stab in the back.” Says Matthews: “On page 67 and on page 70 Mr. Veblen seems to suggest that there are boards of trustees whose members make a personal profit out of the funds entrusted to them; the insinuation is hedged about with weazel words—i. e., ‘instances of the kind are not wholly unknown, though _presumably_ (!) exceptional.’” To appreciate this extreme piety of Professor Brander Matthews, you would have to see him, as I have, dangling a cigarette from his lower lip as he lectures to his students, and causing these prematurely wise young men to chuckle at his worldly wit. For Brander is a club man and cynic, one of the very shrewdest, and he knows what butters parsnips. If in the bosom of the Century Club he and his friend, Nicholas Miraculous, were to hear a story about a member of a school board getting advance information and buying up real estate, or about a college trustee handling the investment of trust funds in such a way as to make “honest graft” out of it, the two of them would tip each other a wink. But when they are talking for publication—when they set out to assassinate a dangerous radical—the two cronies take on an air of innocent trustfulness which has not been met with in the world since Moses Primrose came home from the fair with his gross of green spectacles with silver rims and shagreen cases!