For my part I don’t want to take any chance of being called “a creature who creeps up stealthily with a stiletto to deal a stab in the back!” Whatever my old friend Professor Matthews may say about me when he comes to assassinate this book in the New York “Times,” let him at least put me under his other classification—that more respectable person “who comes straight at us with a bowie knife in his hand.” Before I finish this volume I shall give Professor Matthews several cases of university and college trustees misusing funds; in a succeeding volume, I shall show him school board members getting commissions from book companies, and buying up land to sell to the public for school sites. If Professor Matthews will obtain a copy of a printed report made in 1908 to Mayor Taylor of San Francisco by a graft investigating committee, he will find it proven that one of the regents of the University of California invested university funds in a “French Restaurant” building on the corner of Geary and Mason streets, constructed by him with a view to its use as a house of assignation. And if that seems too far off for Professor Matthews, let him investigate the properties in New York City on which his own university holds its mortgages, and he will find that one of them at least was being used as a disorderly house last spring! Or let him run up to Rochester, where the university is moving out to a magnificent new site, furnished by Mr. Eastman, the kodak king, and all around that site he will find that members of the board of trustees and their relatives and friends have been making money buying up real estate on advance information. Or let him visit the Connecticut College for Women, at New London, and hear the story of Frederick Sykes, the recent president, who discovered that the trustees were stealing the funds of the college, even to the coal, and tried to interfere with them and was fired from his job! One of the trustees was a high school principal, and the board furnished him an automobile to go out and collect funds. He never got any funds, but continued to use the car, and when the scandal was exposed, it was explained that he had arranged to have the price of the car returned to the college in his will. The grand duke who ran this board of trustees was a multi-millionaire, who had set them a bad example by living a dissolute life. He wanted an inn-keeper’s wife, and paid the inn-keeper forty thousand dollars to get a divorce from her; then the grand duke married the lady, and got an honorary degree from his college!